Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

When it comes to software to help IT manage workers’ devices wherever they happen to be, enterprises have long been spoiled for choice — a situation that has come in especially handy in the last 18 months, when many offices globally have gone remote and people have logged into their systems from home. But the same can’t really be said for small and medium enterprises: As with so many other aspects of tech, they’ve long been overlooked when it comes to building modern IT management solutions tailored to their size and needs.

But there are signs of that changing. Today, a startup called Atera that has been building remote, and low-cost, predictive IT management solutions specifically for organizations with less than 1,000 employees, is announcing a funding round of $77 million — a sign of the demand in the market, and Atera’s own success in addressing it. The investment values Atera at $500 million, the company confirmed.

The Tel Aviv-based startup has amassed some 7,000 customers to date, managing millions of endpoints — computers and other devices connected to them — across some 90 countries, providing real-time diagnostics across the data points generated by those devices to predict problems with hardware, software and network, or with security issues.

Atera’s aim is to use the funding both to continue building out that customer footprint, and to expand its product — specifically adding more functionality to the AI that it currently uses (and for which Atera has been granted patents) to run predictive analytics, one of the technologies that today are part and parcel of solutions targeting larger enterprises but typically are absent from much of the software out there aimed at SMBs.

“We are in essence democratizing capabilities that exist for enterprises but not for the other half of the economy, SMBs,” said Gil Pekelman, Atera’s CEO, in an interview.

The funding is being led by General Atlantic, and it is notable for being only the second time that Atera has ever raised money — the first was earlier this year, a $25 million round from K1 Investment Management, which is also in this latest round. Before this year, Atera, which was founded in 2016, turned profitable in 2017 and then intentionally went out of profit in 2019 as it used cash from its balance sheet to grow. Through all of that, it was bootstrapped. (And it still has cash from that initial round earlier this year.)

As Pekelman — who co-founded the company with Oshri Moyal (CTO) — describes it, Atera’s approach to remote monitoring and management, as the space is typically called, starts first with software clients installed at the endpoints that connect into a network, which give IT managers the ability to monitor a network, regardless of the actual physical range, as if it’s located in a single office. Around that architecture, Atera essentially monitors and collects “data points” covering activity from those devices — currently taking in some 40,000 data points per second.

To be clear, these data points are not related to what a person is working on, or any content at all, but how the devices behave, and the diagnostics that Atera amasses and focuses on cover three main areas: hardware performance, networking and software performance and security. Through this, Atera’s system can predict when something might be about to go wrong with a machine, or why a network connection might not be working as it should, or if there is some suspicious behavior that might need a security-oriented response. It supplements its work in the third area with integrations with third-party security software — Bitdefender and Acronis among them — and by issuing updated security patches for devices on the network.

The whole system is built to be run in a self-service way. You buy Atera’s products online, and there are no salespeople involved — in fact most of its marketing today is done through Facebook and Google, Pekelman said, which is one area where it will continue to invest. This is one reason why it’s not really targeting larger enterprises (the others are the level of customization that would be needed; as well as more sophisticated service level agreements). But it is also the reason why Atera is so cheap: it costs $89 per month per IT technician, regardless of the number of endpoints that are being managed.

“Our constituencies are up to 1,000 employees, which is a world that was in essence quite neglected up to now,” Pekelman said. “The market we are targeting and that we care about are these smaller guys and they just don’t have tools like these today.” Since its model is $89 dollars per month per technician using the software, it means that a company with 500 people with four technicians is paying $356 per month to manage their networks, peanuts in the greater scheme of IT services, and one reason why Atera has caught on as more and more employees have gone remote and are looking like they will stay that way.

The fact that this model is thriving is also one of the reason and investors are interested.

“Atera has developed a compelling all-in-one platform that provides immense value for its customer base, and we are thrilled to be supporting the company in this important moment of its growth trajectory,” said Alex Crisses, MD, global head of New Investment Sourcing and co-head of Emerging Growth at General Atlantic, in a statement. “We are excited to work with a category-defining Israeli company, extending General Atlantic’s presence in the country’s cutting-edge technology sector and marking our fifth investment in the region. We look forward to partnering with Gil, Oshri and the Atera team to help the company realize its vision.”

It has been 10 years since Pantheon launched. At the time, it was mostly a hosting service for Drupal sites, but about six years ago, it added WordPress hosting to its lineup and raised more VC money as some of its competitors did the same. After its 2016 Series C round, things started quieting down, though the company has clear ambitions to become a public company in the next few years. To chat about those plans and the overall state of the business, I sat down with Pantheon co-founder and CEO Zack Rosen and new Pantheon board member Elissa Fink, former CMO of Tableau.

Maybe the biggest change at Pantheon is that when it launched, its team was almost solely focused on the developer experience. And while Pantheon was essentially a hosting service and offers personal plans, its focus was never on individuals who wanted a WordPress blog (which a lot of companies focused on, especially in the pre-Twitter days). Its efforts always revolved around businesses, large enterprises and the agencies that serve them.

“Back then, our overriding focus was really around the developer experience — the practitioner experience — of using our product,” Rosen explained. “And frankly, at the time, we actually really didn’t know what to call it. It really didn’t have a category, but we always felt it was something new.” He noted that over the last few years, Pantheon started talking to a lot of marketers and realized that the needs of these marketing leaders are driving this space.

FireHydrant, an NYC startup, wants to help companies recover from IT disasters more quickly, and understand why they happened — with the goal of preventing similar future scenarios from happening again. Today, the fledgling startup announced a $1.5 million seed investment from Work-Bench, a New York City venture capital firm that invests in early-stage enterprise startups.

In addition to the funding, the company announced it was opening registration for its FireHydrant incident management platform. The product has been designed with Google’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) methodology in mind, but company co-founder and CEO Bobby Ross says the tool is designed to help anyone understand the cause of a disaster, regardless of what happened, and whether they practice SRE or not.

“I had been involved in several fire fighting scenarios — from production databases being dropped to Kubernetes upgrades gone wrong — and every incident had a common theme: ?absolute chaos?,” Ross wrote in a blog post announcing the new product.

The product has two main purposes, according to Ross. It helps you figure out what’s happening as you attempt to recover from an ongoing disaster scenario, and once you’ve put out the fire, it lets you do a post-mortem to figure out exactly what happened with the hope of making sure that particular disaster doesn’t happen again.

As Ross describes it, a tool like PagerDuty can alert you that there’s a problem, but FireHydrant lets you figure out what specifically is going wrong and how to solve it. He says that the tool works by analyzing change logs, as a change is often the primary culprit of IT incidents. When you have an incident, FireHydrant will surface that suspected change, so you can check it first.

“We’ll say, hey, you had something change recently in this vicinity where you have an alert going off. There is a high likelihood that this change was actually causing your incident. And we actually bubble that up and mark it as a suspect,” Ross explained.

Screenshot: FireHydrant

Like so many startups, the company developed from a pain point the founders were feeling. The three founders were responsible for solving major outages at companies like Namely, DigitalOcean, CoreOS and Paperless Post.

But the actual idea for the company came about almost accidentally. In 2017, Ross was working on a series of videos and needed a way to explain what he was teaching. “I began writing every line of code with live commentary, and soon FireHydrant started to take the shape of what I envisioned as an SRE while at Namely, and I started to want it more than the video series. 40 hours of screencasts recorded later, I decided to stop recording and focus on the product…,” Ross wrote in the blog post.

Today it integrates with PagerDuty, GitHub and Slack, but the company is just getting started with the three founders, all engineers, working on the product and a handful of beta customers. It is planning to hire more engineers to keep building out the product. It’s early days, but if this tool works as described, it could go a long way toward solving the fire-fighting issues that every company faces at some point.

As companies compete for talent, a startup that has built a platform to help ensure that the talent — once it’s working for you — doesn’t get bogged down by IT frustration, has raised a significant round of funding.

Lausanne, Switzerland-based Nexthink has nailed down $85 million in funding led by Index Ventures (which has a base in nearby Geneva), with participation also from Highland Europe, Forestay Capital, Galéo Capital and TOP Funds and Olivier Pomel (co-founder and CEO of Datadog).

Nexthink’s CEO Pedro Bados said in an interview that the company will be using this round to expand its business globally and specifically in the US.

It will be doing this from a healthy base. The company already has 900 enterprise customers, covering no less than 7 million endpoints, using its platform to improve employees’ interaction and satisfaction with the IT tools that they are required to use for work. Customers include Adobe, Advocate Healthcare, BlackRock, Commerzbank, Safran, Sega HARDlight, Tiffany & Co., Vitality, Wipro and Western Union.

Network monitoring is a big and established area in the world of IT, where tech companies provide a wide array of solutions to identify and potentially fix network glitches across on-premise, cloud and hybrid environments.

What is only becoming more apparent now to organizations is that problems with the dozens of apps and other software that employees need to use can be just as much, if not more, of an issue, when it comes to getting work done — for example, because something is not working in the app, the worker is unsure how to do something, or there is a configuration issue.

That is the issue that Nexthink is tackling. The company installs a widget — it calls it a Collector — on a worker’s phone, tablet, laptop, desktop computer, or whatever device is being used. That Collector in turn monitors hundreds of metrics around how you are using your device, ranging from performance issues and policy breaches through to examining what software is being used, and what is not.

Nexthink’s algorithms both identify and even can anticipate when a problem is happening, and either provide a quick suggestion to fix it, or provide the right data to the IT team to help solve the problem.

In the “marketplace” created in an IT network, you might think of Nexthink as solving problems at two ends: for the IT team, reduces the number of calls it gets by helping solve problems and providing useful information in cases where they will really be needed. For the employees, it gives them a quick and hopefully helpful response so that they can get on with their work.

“Not only are employees happy and more productive, but costs go down on support,” Bados says.

Nexthink has actually been around for 14 years — Bados co-founded Nexthink with Patrick Hertzog and Vincent Bieri not long after he finished his graduate research work in artificial intelligence at the polytechnic in Lausanne — and this latest round is larger than all the funding that the company had raised up to now, which had been $69 million.

That in itself is a sign of how VCs and the industry are waking up to the opportunity to address the challenge of software usability and experience and how that might affect employee satisfaction and productivity.

“We’ve known the company for a while and have a lot of respect for Pedro as a CEO,” said Neil Rimer of Index Ventures in an interview. “We’ve been watching what they have been building focusing on user experience and management, and it’s an area that we find compelling.” Plus the customer caliber and loyalty helped, he said. “The retention and lack of churn are all very impressive.”

Unsurprisingly, there are a number of others also moving into the same space as Nexthink, including Microsoft, VMware and Riverbed, as well as others like New Relic around the same neighborhood of services. For now, Bados says he sees these more as potential partners than rivals.

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