In 2019 they sold their company (Luminate Security) to Symantec for a reported $200 million - just two years after the company was founded. Now, the founding trio of Ofer Smadari, Leonid Belkind, and Eldad Livni emerge from stealth with their new startup StackPulse.
Automating incident response
In spite of the massive market transition to cloud technologies, maintenance of these services is still stuck in the pass, with organizations desperately trying to adapt to advanced technologies with an ill-equipped toolkit. The StackPulse platform continuously pulls incident data and alert communications to enable precision automation for incident response in the cloud. According to the company, the platform allows development teams to define, test and deploy operational processes within existing CI/CD or GitOps pipelines, ensuring operational velocity keeps pace with application delivery.
While chatting with Geektime, CEO Ofer Smadari explains that despite there being a crowded market of cloud management solutions, eventually, they’re all based on a human managing the process: “It’s a “traditional” mindset that IT service management processes factor in the physical on-site human operator. This work, brings with it considerable overhead and takes valuable time away from developers,” he claims.
“Cloud-native technologies have helped developers innovate faster than ever before. But responding to production incidents is still a manual process, conducted with the same IT tools from a decade ago. We’ve seen testing, delivery and security ‘shift left,’ empowering developers to solve production problems with code. StackPulse brings this same DevOps principle to operating more reliable services,” adds Smadari.
Serial entrepreneurs investing in serial entrepreneurs
With the emergence from stealth, StackPulse also announced closing 2 funding rounds: a 2020 $8 million Seed round from Bessemer Venture Partners, and a $20 million Series A led by GGV Capital. Bessemer also participated in the Series A round, in addition to a few familiar faces from Israel’s tech scene, including Assaf Rappaport, former Adallom founder, Head of Microsoft Israel, and current CEO of Wiz; Nadir Izrael and Yevgeny Dibrov from Armis; Benny Schneider, who made over $700 million from selling three different startups, and more recently founded Salto; Dean Sysman, CEO at Auxonius; and Asaf Wand, who founded InsurTech firm Hippo.
In StackPulse’s case, it’s all about entrepreneurs investing in entrepreneurs. StackPulse’s founding trio looks to build on previous success with the acquisition of their former startup, Luminate Security, by Symantec for hundreds of millions of dollars. Luminate was only operational for 2 years and had raised only $14 million before Symantec swooped in with the multi-million dollar acquisition.
StackPulse already reports an impressive list of customers from both Israel and the U.S., such as The Meet Group, Armis, and others. The Tel Aviv based company intends on tripling its team of 35 workers, who are split between Portland, NYC, and Israel.
