Building an improved observability stack for developers, Better Stack has just raised over €18.2 million. The Czech startup’s product leverages the advances of the ClickHouse database and brings enhanced collaboration.
While we are undoubtedly living in a digitally-driven world, developers are increasingly in demand to keep the software that is fuelling innovation running optimally. However, there are some considerable challenges they still have to contend with. Namely, that software reliability is still unsolved – as shown by major outages of companies like Atlassian and Cloudflare earlier this year. Better Stack is on a mission to address, helping developers to build a better internet.
The startup has just raised €18.2 million to fuel its mission in a Series A funding round. Creandum led the round, with Carl Fritjofsson joining the board. Susa Ventures, K5 Global, Credo Ventures, Kaya, Lachy Groom, Ryan Petersen (founder of Flexport), Michael Stoppelman (SVP of Engineering of Yelp), Emil Eifrem (founder of Neo4j), Zach Sims (founder of Codecademy), Madhu Muthukumar (CPO at Notion) and others also joined.
ClickHouse-based challenger
Founded in 2021, the Czech-based startup is aiming to empower developers with a disruptive observability stack, that brings Figma-like collaboration to developers and leverages the advances of the ClickHouse database. The aim is that the tool will make it easier to ship better and more reliable software faster.
Today, developers are still relying on a multitude of tools that need integrating, are costly, are complicated to use, and, feel a little old in a constantly changing and evolving software landscape. Better Stack’s solution combines monitoring, logging, incident management, status pages, and more into a single platform – making it a developer’s dream come true.
Juraj Masar, Better Stack CEO and co-founder commented: “We lived the daily struggles engineers go through at our previous jobs and with Better Stack we decided to solve at least some of them. We are simply engineers making the tools we always wanted to use.”
The product is reported to be about 10x cheaper yet 10-100x faster than alternatives. Customers are also able to keep data in hot storage for longer, thanks to the ClickHouse database, and, it leverages SQL for data querying so is more intuitive to use. Further, adopting Figma-like collaboration allows developers to work together in real-time.
Veronika Kolejak, Better Stack COO and co-founder said: “Take 10 engineers off the street and ask them: are you fluent in Datadog Query Language, New Relic Query Language, AWS CloudWatch Query Language, PromQL, LogQL… and 9 out of 10 will say no. But every engineer knows SQL, which is why with Better Stack, we’re making it the querying standard for software observability. And this is just one of the decisions we made that makes us ‘just work’ for so many engineers.”
Tomas Hromada, Better Stack CTO added: “For us, developer tools don’t mean they can’t be beautifully designed or a joy to use. We think that all users, whether they are indie hackers or CTOs of large corporations, deserve a great experience. Developers do care about working with tools that focus on design and UX as much as they focus on functionality.”
Next steps
Since its launch in 2021, Better Stack is now used by over 70k developers and over 1,400 customers. eams from enterprises including ESET, Decathlon, Time.com, and Accenture; startups like Brave and Drata and indie hackers such as Plausible or Buy me a coffee already rely on the platform.
The Series A investment will support Better Stack’s continued growth and allow it to scale the product at a faster pace to help more developers around the world.
Carl Fritjofsson, General Partner at Creandum said: “At Creandum, we deeply care about product experiences, and Better Stack not only redefined what beautiful and intuitive observability products look like, but ultimately Better Stack customers will be empowered to build better products themselves. With 10x lower cost and 10x better performance we are convinced that Better Stack will become an important part of software infrastructure.”
