Checkly secures $20M Series B for code error detection

Checkly – the leading provider of synthetic monitoring powered by Monitoring as Code (MaC) and Playwright – has raised a $20 million Series B funding round led by Balderton Capital. Existing investors Accel, CRV, and Paul H. Müller also participated. 

Founded in 2020, Checkly's technology enables engineers to detect and resolve issues 10x faster through code-first synthetic monitoring that helps engineering teams through a code-first workflow. Checkly provides the most effective solutions for developers for proactive issue detection, before users even realize there’s a problem. In today's 24/7 world, quick detection and resolution of issues is business critical both to prevent costly downtime and to meet customer expectations. Yet very few engineers have access to full observability and monitoring tools, and many of these tools still run in silos, managed separately from the app or API’s code. This disconnect means the average time to repair faults is more than an hour for most businesses (82%). 

By integrating advanced, proactive and purpose-built synthetic monitoring tools inside repositories, Checkly ensures monitoring is always in sync with the latest code changes. Engineers and developers can simulate user interactions continuously in 20+ remote locations worldwide using automated Playwright scripts, and get automatic, real-time, accurate alerts alongside detailed insights that help them turn alerts into action. This not only makes it easier for developers to track and manage everything in one place, but it helps catch issues early, without the usual delays and false positives seen with legacy tools. All while empowering the DevOps team to understand and own the monitoring of their services. 

The monitoring and observability market is expected to grow 11.7% to $4.1bn by 2028 as downtime becomes ever more critical to businesses and Checkly has rapidly become one of the industry’s leading challengers of legacy systems, recently named a Gartner Cool Vendor 2023. This recognition followed Checkly’s Monitoring as Code being named an emerging practice in two of last year’s Gartner Hype Cycles - Monitoring and Observability Hype Cycle and SRE Hype Cycle. Checkly’s co-founders CEO Hannes Lenke, Chief Evangelist Tim Nolet, and COO Timo Euteneuer have deep understanding of the software development cycle and proven experience in building companies in web monitoring and observability.

With the new funding, Checkly plans to grow its teams, expand its reach, and further develop its code-first monitoring platform to support even faster remediation. It brings Checkly's total funding to $32.25M and will see Balderton Capital Partner, Colin Hanna join Checkly's board of directors, bringing insights and expertise to the company's growth.

In conjunction with the funding announcement, Checkly is unveiling its new Checkly Traces feature which will help engineers resolve issues even faster by connecting synthetics with tracing. In this way, engineers will have immediate insight into failures and will no longer need manual data correlation.

Hannes Lenke, CEO of Checkly said: “Today, only a fraction of engineers have access to observability and monitoring tools, many of which don’t give modern development teams the insight, speed, scale or accuracy they need. At Checkly, we bring monitoring to where Engineering teams live and work – inside their code repositories. Monitoring as Code is the best way for teams to own and automate their monitoring. With our funding news, and the announcement that we’re uniting synthetics with  Checkly Traces, we’re thrilled to be able to continue empowering engineers to detect and resolve issues faster and easier than ever before.”

Colin Hanna, Partner at Balderton Capital said: "Checkly approaches monitoring and observability with a fresh perspective. Monitoring as Code means empowering developers to own the reliability of their services, APIs, and applications. This shrinks both time to resolution and the cost of observability. Some of the world's most sophisticated software companies, like Vercel and commercetools, appreciate the significance of this shift and are valuable customers. All of us at Balderton are deeply impressed with what Hannes and the team have already achieved and are grateful to be on the journey together.

“Using Checkly levels up your team to the point where it starts to feel like an unfair advantage,” said James Hall, Founder at Parallax. “We’ve had end-to-end monitors written on many projects, and the risk is they start to die and become unmaintainable. Part of that is because of difficulties unpicking what’s actually happening under the hood. Checkly Traces changes all that, making observability seamless and effective. It provides us with the necessary insights to pinpoint issues and optimize our caching strategy. The straightforward onboarding and automated trace correlation have made our troubleshooting process much faster and more efficient.”