Israeli startup Lightrun, which developed a system that enables developers to easily debug production and staging code in real-time, officially announced a $4 million Seed funding round, led by Glilot Capital Ventures and a number of Angel investors.
Debugging while the app is running
Lightrun’s continuous debugging and observability system allows developers to debug live applications and make live changes, saving them the headache of searching through countless log lines and needing to release a whole new update just for that one little production mistake.
Lightrun explains that using its technology turns the production and staging environments totally transparent for developers. Further claiming, that its IDE add-on can allow developers to add logs, metrics, and trace code that is already running, giving them the flexibility to make in-app changes without all the tedious detective work needed to find and fix a bug in production code.
The company also developed Sandbox (patent pending) to ensure that its add-on doesn’t cause any side effects that alter the designated app’s behavior. This also allows developers to enter metrics, timers, traces, and other options to track and synchronize performance issues in real-time, without interfering with the system’s functionality.
In order to allow organizations full control over its code and sensitive info, Lightrun enables local installation in addition to its cloud abilities. The Israeli startup’s service sits as an agnostic agent waiting to be deployed onto any environment, even serverless ones. However, currently, the company only supports certain languages like JVM languages, but intends to use the investment to further expand its language capabilities.
In a conversation with Geektime, company CEO Ilan Peleg explained that the idea which led him and CTO Leonid Blouvshtein to found the company in 2019, came from their personal experience as developers, facing one too many times the aggravation of the debugging process. “We ran into too many frustrating situations of critical problems in the production environment, without being able to see the problem’s source, mainly due to the lack of transparency in the environment. It’s like a sort of developing blindness. Too many times we hit ourselves over the head because we didn’t add a log or metric in the right place.”
Peleg further adds that “CI/CD allows for the necessary agility for developers, though, only as long as the application isn’t live. But why should that agility stop there? And that’s how we came up with the idea for Lightrun, which allows continuous debugging and observability that completes CI/CD allowing a full range of agility for developers.”
In addition to the aforementioned adding of languages, the Israeli startup intends to use the newly acquired capital to also take the first step into the realm of marketing and sales, while still focusing on improving product capabilities.
This is how it works:
