The New Management Layer — CRV’s Series A Investment in Checkly
By Kate Murdock and Reid Christian
At CRV, we are all in on the Jamstack. Our investments in Vercel, Kong, Postman, and Gatsby give CRV a front row seat to the maturing landscape. We’ve previously written about the shift in frontend architecture and its benefits for performance, scale, security, portability, and the developer experience. We used to say that this was the future, but it’s no longer the new kid on the block.
With any architectural shift, a new management layer of tooling must be rethought, including monitoring, alerting, and securing those applications. Additionally, as more teams invest in DevOps and individual developers take on ownership for reliability from dev/test through production, monitoring only becomes a more critical component of this landscape.
With the traditional web, you had a client, web server, app server, database, and CMS. Now you have a client, CDN, and a multitude of microservices. With this new distributed architecture, there has been an explosion of APIs. So how do you maintain reliability in this new world?
Checkly monitors business critical APIs and web applications. They’re focused on building the #1 active monitoring workflow for developers starting a Jamstack project. Checkly crossed their 1,000,000,000th check run this month, putting them well on their way to achieving their vision of being a single pane of glass into reliability for your Jamstack!
We first discovered Checkly through our friend and CRV-backed founder, Guillermo Rauch. When he says that a product in this space is phenomenal, we know we have to pay attention.
The first thing that struck us was the team’s deep dedication to their users and customers, including finn.auto, 1Password, Vercel, commercetools, and Lidl. In their customers, we’ve seen how Checkly can start with a core API team and spread across the organization as other folks see how simple it is to create and run checks. In them, we believe there is an opportunity to reshape reliability and become the monitoring and tool for the Jamstack.
We are excited to announce that the Checkly team has chosen to partner with CRV for their Series A as they bring this vision to fruition. This also marks a bit of a Jamstack reunion, as we invest alongside Accel (fellow board members at Vercel) and Guillermo (founder & CEO of Vercel).
