App observability and debugging platform Lightrun sees $23M

Lightrun, a startup developing tools to monitor production code, today announced it has raised $23 million in series A funding round led by Insight Partners. The company says the funding will be used to expand its platform and acquire new customers as it grows its employee headcount.

According to a study published by the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School, programmers spend 50.1% of their work time on things other than programming — largely debugging. The total estimated cost of debugging is a whopping $312 billion per year. Observability tools promise to cut development costs substantially while enabling coders to focus on more creative, less repetitive tasks.

Tel Aviv, Israel-based Lightrun, which was founded in 2019 by Ilan Peleg and Leonid Blouvshtein, allows developers to inject logs, metrics, traces, and more during app runtime for debugging purposes. The platform can verify new features as part of existing continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines, Peleg and Blouvshtein said, and streamline the process of defining and consuming observability.

Lightrun inserts logs and metrics in real time, even while services are running, letting developers choose insertion points directly from integrated development environments or command-line interfaces. Using the platform, they can quickly add a missing logline or place a snapshot to be taken on demand without having to replicate the production environment or redeploy.

Once its instrumentation is invoked, Lightrun prints data to third-party log analysis tools or integrated development environments. Developers can analyze code behavior to find bottlenecks and errors from there.

“Lightrun is transforming how developers observe, understand, and debug live applications,” Peleg told VentureBeat via email. “They can simply do it in the same fashion [as] debugging local development applications.”

Upward momentum

Lightrun, which has more than a dozen customers, launched a free community edition of its platform for observabiilty in April. Peleg says that in the last year, the company doubled its number of employees and launched new integrations with Datadog, IntelliJ IDEA, Logz.io, Prometheus, Slack, and StatsD.

“The pandemic raised the demand for better ways to remotely debug software,” Peleg. “Obviously during a pandemic, sales engineers can’t visit remote sites to fix bugs. So software providers who ship software to run on-prem in private datacenters — often for privacy and security reasons — need ways to remotely troubleshoot that software during the pandemic, including in environments that aren’t even network-connected. Lightrun experienced such demand for remote troubleshooting of on-premises software that it actually launched a new version of its product specifically optimized for troubleshooting remote applications with no network connectivity.”

Glilot Capital Partners also participated in Lightrun’s funding round, bringing its total raised to date to over $26 million. The company, which has 20 employees, previously raised $4 million in a seed funding round that closed in June 2020.

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