Qpoint: Interview With CEO & Co-Founder Tyler Flint About Third-Party API Observability And Control With eBPF

By Amit Chowdhry • Nov 13, 2024

Qpoint is a company that enables you to take control of your external APIs and traffic to ensure secure and reliable cloud-connected applications. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Qpoint CEO and co-founder Tyler Flint to learn more about the company.

Tyler Flint’s Background

Tyler Flint

What is Tyler Flint’s background? Flint said:

“I’ve founded four other companies focusing on platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology. One of my favorites was Nanobox, which I co-founded with Mark Parson in 2016 and sold to DigitalOcean after three years. Before I caught the founder bug, I architected technical platforms at scale for companies like Facebook and Zumiez.”

Formation Of Qpoint

How did the idea for Qpoint come together? Flint shared:

“Companies can easily have hundreds of external integrations that are difficult to monitor, secure, and control. While these dependencies are technically not “your services,” they are increasingly your problem. Our team lived this pain firsthand at some of the most popular software and infrastructure companies in the world, including Shopify, Instacart, NS1, and HashiCorp.”

“So, we decided to do something about it. Turns out that external integrations are a huge blind spot for any company—even large enterprises with a stack of application performance monitoring (APM), network observability, and API management tools.”

“Now, after two years of innovation and testing, we unveiled Qpoint, the first eBPF-powered platform that enables operators to easily see and control external dependencies and traffic.”

Core Products

Qpoint

What are the company’s core products and features? Flint explained:

“Qpoint is the first specialized solution to enable operators to easily see and control external dependencies and traffic. Powered by eBPF, Qpoint transparently taps into the flow of traffic between apps and their external dependencies without data leaving the environment. Deployed in just minutes, it delivers instant visibility and the foundation needed to boost operational resilience and enforce a true zero-trust security model—with zero compromises for developers driving innovation.”

Significant Milestones

What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Flint cited:

“The support for our pre-seed funding mirrors the excitement and demand we’re seeing in the market. We’ve brought on some amazing design partners who are validating our product roadmap. As new Qpoint features come to life, the biggest milestone is watching the tangible impact they have for customers. Just stopping a single outage can pay for Qpoint.”

Funding

When asking Flint about the company’s funding details, he revealed:

In October, we closed $4 million in pre-seed funding from Mango Capital, Preface Ventures, Scribble Ventures and Bloomberg Beta.”

Differentiation From The Competition

What differentiates the company from its competition? Flint affirmed:

“Qpoint is purpose-built for external services and integrations. Qpoint leverages eBPF to enable teams to securely track API calls, inspect payloads, and detect errors in real time without the operational hassle of proxy-based solutions that create single points of failure and add significant certificate management overhead.”

“With eBPF, Qpoint enables teams to capture data at the kernel level, offering unprecedented visibility into unencrypted payloads and insights into how applications interact with external systems without requiring code changes. This includes detecting errors or anomalous behavior early to avoid outages, troubleshooting external service issues faster and even reducing cloud costs by analyzing traffic patterns. eBPF allows all of this to happen without any modification to the application code, maintaining system performance while providing the deep insights needed to optimize operations.”

Future Goals

What are some of the company’s future goals? Flint pointed out:

“The interest and demand for Qpoint since its launch has been amazing. Right now, we’re expanding engineering resources to add even more controls to the platform. There’s so much opportunity to grow the platform, so we expect to raise again next year.”

Evolution Of Qpoint’s Technology

How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Flint noted:

“When Qpoint first launched, we started with a proxy-based solution to monitor external API traffic. While effective, it quickly became clear that this approach introduced unnecessary complexity and overhead—particularly around certificate management, latency, and scaling challenges. Our early customers needed a solution that provided deeper insights without the performance trade-offs and maintenance headaches associated with traditional proxies.”

“Recognizing these limitations, we pivoted to leverage eBPF technology. This shift was transformative. Unlike proxies, eBPF allows us to monitor API traffic directly at the kernel level, enabling real-time visibility, payload inspection, and error detection without requiring man-in-the-middle configurations or impacting system performance. By moving to eBPF, we significantly enhanced our platform’s capabilities, providing customers with a more scalable, efficient, and secure way to manage their external API dependencies.”

“This evolution has positioned Qpoint as a cutting-edge solution for real-time observability and compliance, empowering teams to optimize their external integrations with minimal overhead.”

Challenges Faced

What challenges have Flint and the team faced in building the company? Flint acknowledged:

“One of our biggest challenges has been navigating a market where eBPF technology, despite its transformative potential, is still relatively unfamiliar to many enterprise teams. While eBPF offers significant advantages for API monitoring—including enhanced performance, deeper visibility, and simplified deployment—we’ve had to invest considerable effort in educating our customer base about these benefits. This educational investment has paid off, as more companies recognize how eBPF-based monitoring can provide the deep visibility they need without the operational overhead of legacy approaches. Our commitment to market education has not only helped drive adoption but has also positioned Qpoint as a thought leader in the API observability space.”

Total Addressable Market

What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Flint assessed:

“Qpoint is addressing a rapidly growing market at the intersection of API management, observability, and cloud transformation, which is projected to exceed $30 billion by 2026. As organizations increasingly rely on external APIs to deliver critical functionalities, the need for tools that provide visibility, security, and control over these integrations is more urgent than ever.”

“Our focus is on companies operating in cloud-native environments, including SaaS platforms, fintech, and digital enterprises, where secure and reliable third-party API integrations are essential. With the surge in cloud adoption, regulatory compliance requirements, and the need for robust third-party service management, Qpoint’s platform taps into significant demand from DevOps, security, and platform engineering teams.”

Customer Success Stories

When asking Flint about customer success stories, he concluded:

“One of our most impactful success stories involves a growing CRM platform that was struggling with unreliable third-party services—critical dependencies for their core business operations. Before implementing Qpoint, their team was effectively flying blind whenever issues arose with these external APIs. They had no visibility into whether problems originated from their own systems or their vendors, leading to prolonged troubleshooting cycles and frustrated customers.”

“After deploying our eBPF probe (Qtap), they gained immediate visibility into their entire API ecosystem. When one of their payment processing integrations began experiencing intermittent failures, they were able to quickly identify the exact nature and timing of the errors. Armed with detailed performance metrics and error logs, they could definitively demonstrate service-level agreement violations to their vendor, leading to faster resolution and proper accountability.”

“This enhanced visibility has transformed their operations. What previously took hours or days to diagnose now takes minutes, significantly reducing their mean time to resolution. More importantly, they’ve been able to shift from a reactive to proactive stance, identifying potential issues before they impact customers.”