Israeli startup Rookout raises $8 million in round led by Cisco to ease developers’ debugging pains

Tel Aviv-based Rookout, the code-level data extraction and pipelining platform, has announced today that it has raised $8 million in funding to accelerate its commercial growth and to cover additional observability use cases and languages. The Series A round was led by Cisco Investments, alongside existing investors TLV Partners and Emerge, with industry leaders Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub, John Kodumal, CTO and cofounder of LaunchDarkly, and Raymond Colletti (VP of Revenue at Codecov) joining in.

Since exiting stealth just over a year ago, Rookout’s data collection has defined a new category of observability software that decouples data from code, making understanding and debugging code easier and faster. Rookout claims that companies using its observability software have seen the time it takes to make a single observation reduced from hours to a few seconds, minimizing the chore aspects of debugging, providing deep code insights and freeing up vital R&D resources to focus on features.

"The future of software lies in cutting down on deployment, reducing CI/CD strain and speeding development and the delivery of new features,” explained Kodumal, “With Rookout, you never have to waste time deploying new code to get data from your old code. Everything is just available with a click. Once you decouple data from code, anything is possible."

Rookout is SOC2 compliant, and currently available in Python, Node.js, and JVM runtimes, in all environments from on-prem to serverless. In the coming year, the company plans to add additional programming languages and new features.

“At first, we focused on Rookout’s easiest-to-understand use case: debugging,” commented Or Weis, co-founder and CEO of Rookout. “In the last year, we’ve discovered that our customers are finding completely new ways to use Rookout’s code-level data collection capabilities and that we need to accommodate, support and enhance the many varied uses of code-level observability and pipelining.” 

To date, Rookout has acquired a base of paying corporate customers including top-tier software firms. To bring the power of instant code-level observability to everyone, the startup is also launching a free-tier option.