"The evolution that has taken place in the way software is developed. The environments are not easily accessible to developers, and the ability to understand what is really happening in the application becomes much more difficult and lengthier, especially when customers are experiencing failures,” the company's CEO and one of its founders, Shahar Fogel, explained in a conversation with Geektime. Vogel gave the example of microservices architecture and the way in which software is managed, for example on cloud infrastructures, Kubernetes, Serverless and more. This is exactly where Rookout, founded 5 years ago, comes into the picture.

Today (Tuesday), the Israeli startup, which develops a platform that helps developers understand the code they are working on, announced the completion of a $16 million Series B funding round. The round was led by Fort Ross Ventures, with participation from existing investors TLV Partners, Emerge, and Cisco Investments as well as new investors: LIAN Group and Binder & Partners.

"We focused on the metrics that no one was talking about"

Rookout develops a platform that helps developers understand the behaviour of the code they are working on after it has been pushed to remote environments. It enables developers to find the data they need immediately, understand the source of the problems in their code, and thus resolve them quickly. Among other things, Rookout's platform makes it possible to add and receive information instantly, like logs, metrics, and traces, even from the deepest levels of live code– all without writing code, deploying a version and stopping the application, which enables work with production environments. According to the company, In some cases, they are able to shorten debugging time by 80 percent.

This is your first recruitment since 2019. Since then, the pandemic has subsided, Israel saw a record year in recruitments, and now we are facing a market crisis: what led you to recruit now?

"We didn't recruit during the pandemic because Rookout is a pioneer in its technological solution and in the way in which organizations work to reduce the time spent on troubleshooting, planning large resources both in building a product and in educating the market to have this solution. In addition, from our point of view, we think the market is in a much better place now. Plus, the pain of organizational development today is greater than ever before, which is evident to us by our growing customer base and their use of the product. So far, in our research for responsibly building the business and considering all business-related indicators– even the ones that no one has talked about in the last three years– we chose to raise the amount of money the company needs as a result of increasing business demand; it will allow us to develop the product and company to its proper valuation and will not affect us negatively."

Fogel says that they managed to close the recruitment within a few weeks and that the main change between the recruitments before COVID, during our peak year, and now is that now, the market has levelled out and deepened its due diligence. "Investors were more focused on the business model, revenue projections, and expense structure. We are very happy with the amount of money we raised, which will help us to continue to grow over a long period of time and to pass this unsteady period in a healthy way, by growing the business and preserving our status."

The long haul: build sales networks in the U.S and Europe

As mentioned, this round was led by Fort Ross Ventures; Sharin Fisher, a partner at the VC, will join the company's board of directors. We asked Fisher about her plans for the company for both the near and long terms, as entrepreneurs often turn to the board for advice, or the board is sometimes asked by investors to make tough decisions regarding the company like focusing on profit rather than growth.

“We’ve been impressed with Rookout’s execution of its groundbreaking solution, alongside the rapid trajectory of its growing customer base and significant expansion momentum within the enterprise,” said Fisher  she comtinued: "We are coming to a third wave of observability tools which shifts everything further left, and we’re excited to support Rookout’s journey and backing Rookout CEO Shahar Fogel, and the team as the category-defining leader in developer-first observability.”