Our Investment in IOPipe
By Nate Vasel, Principal, and Esteban Reyes, Founding Partner at Las Olas VC (a.k.a. LOVC)
IOPipe solves the challenges development teams face when attempting to instrument, observe, and monitor event-driven applications. Adam and Erica make up an incredibly experienced cloud and infrastructure team, and we at LOVC are thrilled to be partnered with them as our newest portfolio investment.
The future is serverless
Enterprises are adopting “serverless” computing driven by significant increase in developer productivity, and reduction in infrastructure cost (i.e. 10% the cost of AWS EC2/EC3). Serverless eliminates the need for developers to configure and manage infrastructure, and instead allows them to focus on delivering business logic and functionality into applications. Per the most recent Cloudability Survey serverless adoption grew 667% in Q4 2017, up from 321% in Q3 2017.
While serverless provides massive advantages, there’s insufficient tooling, which creates adoption challenges:
- Instrumentation and visibility of application performance
- Debugging and testing
- Deployment
- Design patterns
- Reusable components
- Monitoring and alerts
IOPipe solves most of those problems by providing an application performance management platform purpose-built for server-less, allowing developers to:
- Develop and debug code faster
- Discover and fix problems before users notice
- Never dig through log files again
With the growing adoption of micro services architectures, and the dependency of “always-on” availability, the need for real time, predictive application monitoring and alerting will continue to grow. Serverless adds another layer of complexity and requirements for software devs, and IOPipe is well positioned to be their go-to APM platform purpose built to handle it all.
Early market, yes, but accelerating rapidly
IDC estimates the spend on serverless computing to be ~$1Bn in 2018, and growing at ~40% CAGR through 2022. More practically, we consistently heard from Fortune 500 CIOs that serverless spend will increasingly become a relevant budget line item. The key reason is that in addition to cost savings serverless dramatically reduces the time to deliver new applications with less resources.
While serverless is at the early-stages of the adoption cycle we believe it is inevitable. And because it’s an early market the opportunity is not obvious or comfortable for many, which makes it a very attractive opportunity with asymmetric returns potential.
What’s next for IOPipe?
Adam and Erica will be expanding engineering and sales, and accelerating product development and go-to-market activities. We‘re honored to be working closely with them alongside Eliot Durbin, Ryan Floyd, and Matt McIlwain.
Keep track of IOPipe’s progress here:
