- Data extraction and pipelining platform Rookout announced it raised $8 million in funding led by Cisco Investments
Rookout — a data extraction and pipelining platform — announced that it has raised $8 million in funding led by Cisco Investments. TLV Partners and Emerge also joined the round. Industry investors Nat Friedman (CEO of GitHub), John Kodumal (CTO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly), and Raymond Colletti (VP of Revenue at Codecov) also joined the round.
Rookout is also going to use the funding to continue its commercial growth while expanding its core offering to cover additional observability use cases and languages. And coinciding with this news, the company also announced a free-tier option.
Ever since Rookout exited stealth just over a year ago, Rookout’s code-level data collection has defined a new category of observability software that decouples data from code, making understanding and debugging code easier and massively faster. And companies using Rookout 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.
Rookout allows software engineers to set “non-breaking breakpoints” with a single click and collect live code execution data on-the-fly without stopping the code or requiring any redeployment. And Rookout’s flexibility enables it to be used in the most modern infrastructures, including containerized code on Kubernetes clusters as well as traditional legacy systems. Plus it is also the first and only solution for debugging the code of live serverless functions in production.
In the coming year, the company is planning to add additional programming languages alongside its existing support for JVM-based languages like Java and Kotlin as well as NodeJS and Python.
“The unique aspect of our technology is in the decoupling of data from code, which gives access to the app’s data layer without affecting the code layer,” said Rookout co-founder and CEO Or Weis in a statement. “This new approach is changing both the way developers perceive their software and the way they interact with it. We started by highlighting relatively simple use cases for this capability, such as logging and debugging, but we’ve discovered in the past year that our customers have been finding completely new ways to use Rookout’s code-level data collection capabilities. We’re now focused on accommodating, supporting and enhancing the many varied uses of code-level observability and pipelining.”
Rookout has grown from a 20-person team and is building up its San Francisco Bay-Area office to complement the Tel Aviv -based R&D team. And Rookout has acquired a strong base of paying corporate customers including top-tier software firms as well as a fast-growing online “self-service” process.
“Developers have become key influencers of enterprise IT spend. By collecting data on-demand without re-deploying, Rookout created a Developer-centric software, which short-circuits complexities in the production debugging, increases Developer efficiency and reduces the friction which exist between IT Ops and Developers,” added Rob Salvagno – VP of Cisco Global Corporate Development and Cisco Investments. “We’re proud to be backing Rookout and look forward to the strategic opportunities our relationship opens up.”
Using Rookout, software teams have saved hours of work and reduced debugging and logging time by 80% with zero friction, overhead, or risk. And Rookout is SOC2 compliant, and is currently available in Python, Node.js, and JVM runtimes in all environments from on-prem to serverless.
“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.”
