People First - Investing in Lumigo
We are proud to share that Lumigo, a Grove portfolio company that lets developers gain control of their Serverless operations, has exited stealth mode and has announced its extraordinarily substantial seed investment. In light of this announcement, we wanted to share how our mutual story began. This one was definitely a love at first sight, which may happen very often to venture capitalists with entrepreneurs, but doesn’t happen often to me in particular (not just at work, by the way. Probably, this is why I’m still single).
Lumigo’s founders are the type we like the best: strong technologists, unique talents with great spirits and extensive experience in delivering cloud products to the market. More than anything, we were impressed by the thoroughness of their market validation, which was presented after conducting meetings with multiple adopters of Serverless technologies (both enterprise companies and intended users). They were determined to demonstrate how Lumigo will be in the frontier of cloud development and architecture, leading the Serverless revolution.
We were quickly convinced, but we also sensed that an average round would not be good enough in this case. We wanted the team to have stability, as well as enough resources for a full-blown attack on the large market they’re conquering. We knew that the team would need enough breathing room for the marathon ahead, crucial especially in an emerging market such as Serverless. Lumigo raised $8M — the largest seed in Serverless ecosystem ever and an abnormal seed round even outside of Israel, where the median seed round is >$3M. It hit the road with the backing of Pitango, Meron Capital and Grove, all strong Lumigo-believers. A lesson can be learned here by all startups: creating a strong group of investors so early on is a great practice that gives an immense added-value in the long run. When you build a company, you don’t just want to raise money. You want money from the right people that will work cooperatively to best support your needs.
The Lumigo team has all the right things going for them:
They are the right team
Erez Berkner and Aviad Mor, Lumigo’s founders, are both ex- Check Point executives with years of experience under their belts. Erez, Lumigo’s CEO, graduated college at 18 and that’s hardly his most impressive achievement. He was Check Points’ Director of Cloud Security Products, heading the company’s cloud strategy and execution while Aviad, CTO, founded the Next Generation R&D group within the company. Together they make an unbeatable duo, ready to shape the way companies are addressing Serverless challenges.
With the right problem to solve
Serverless is transforming the way developers think, design and execute. This means that traditional tools for observability, monitoring, troubleshooting and management are simply not applicable. Lumigo’s solution will allow the industry to take the leap forward it yearns for.
They have a solution we believe in
The Lumigo platform allows developers to adopt a Serverless architecture and operate their Serverless applications easily and seamlessly, overcoming the Serverless-specific challenges around monitoring and troubleshooting. Lumigo has the potential to become the Serverless Management Platform category leader — by providing one reliable source to all deployed Serverless functions as well as by knowing how to track events and identify the source of a downtime. In addition, it has the potential to provide a predictive mechanism for preventing such issues from reoccurring in the future.
And their timing is, well, spot on.
The paradigm shift to Serverless computing, while encompassing huge potential of improved efficiency across every key aspect of software development, introduces new DevOps challenges. While the adoption of Serverless in large enterprises is estimated to be x10 faster than container adoption (projected to generate revenue of 7.72 billion by 2021) the technology and its ecosystem are still in their early days, creating a gap in many core capabilities that must urgently be addressed. Grove strategically invests in technologies that make industries smarter, and based on our extensive global experience with the IoT world we believe that Serverless will be the preferred architecture in most use cases where the real world will meet the digital one. Robust, reliable cloud infrastructure is a crucial milestone in the path to industry 4.0 and the IoT revolution around the corner.
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These are exciting times for Lumigo. They continue to build their core development team and product, shaping the company’s way towards success. Now it’s time for both Grove and Lumigo to roll up our sleeves and get started. Wish we would have had some time for pom poms and cheerleading, but a lot of hard work is ahead of us.
The Lumigo vision doesn’t end at Serverless. The long-term plan is to provide modern applications a new technology stack which will be a combination of Serverless, containers and external SaaS, across clouds and on premise. This way, Lumigo’s solution will become the go-to unified platform for a variety of departments in organizations (Dev, Ops, Sec, Finance, etc.), all while providing value for each department — from application design to production runtime.
Stay tuned.
Starting its journey with the largest seed round in Serverless, enabling developers to operate their applications easily and seamlessly on a cloud-based infrastructure — we are proud and excited to have Lumigo as a Grove Ventures portfolio company.
