Announcing Lightspeed’s Series A investment in Blink, a low-code automation platform for cloud operations.
“No/Low-code” is a new catchphrase for an old phenomena. Generally speaking, making important jobs less complicated and more accessible to non-experts expands the market and unlocks value. In Blink’s case, the job at hand isn’t just important but mission critical. In tech companies, ops teams are responsible for product delivery, availability, stability and security.
At Lightspeed, we’ve already partnered with multiple companies taking a no/low-code approach across different verticals, so when we first met team Blink, the idea to simplify and democratize the work of ops teams resonated immediately. Especially as it came from a founding team with such deep, first-hand knowledge of the problem (more on them below).
The life of DevOps, SecOps and SRE personnel has become extremely complicated and demanding over a very short period of time for several reasons:
- Talent shortage — experienced ops people are among the toughest hires these days. Demand is far outstripping supply and the gap is only widening. This means the average ops person has to deal with many more tasks and workflows.
- Complex environment—modern, ‘cloud native’ organizations are much more agile but also more complicated and dynamic from an ops perspective. With hundreds of different SaaS services, different public and private cloud workloads and code changes in production happening every day, the ‘job to be done’ is much more complex compared to prior generation companies and only getting more so.
- Shift in responsibilities — these days, ops teams overlap quite significantly with security and R&D. Balancing usability and agility on one hand vs. keeping environments secure and stable on the other (AKA ship fast, don’t break things!) is a tough act.
- Insufficient know-how and tooling — many teams still rely on home-grown tools and custom built workflows (often manual, ticket driven) for their daily work.
We believe the above gaps can only be addressed through technology and automation at scale which will dramatically improve productivity and allow fewer people to do much more. Enter Blink.
Blink offers modern cloud teams the ability to quickly build in-house apps, run them and collaborate in real time. Blink’s builder allows anyone on the ops team to build these apps with no need for coding and also comes pre-packaged with recommended apps based on common services, company vertical and size. Blink allows DevOps, SecOps and SRE team members to eliminate repetitive work and move faster and smarter.
As always, a big part of our decision to invest was Blink’s founding team- Gil, Haviv and Zion bring years of relevant experience to the table. Not just as founders with successful exits under their belt but also as tech, product and sales executives in category defining companies such as ServiceNow and Palo Alto Networks. They have a deep understanding of their users and a very specific (and compelling) vision of the product, and company they want to build. We’re excited to partner with Blink to bring this vision to life and if this sounds like something you’d like to take part in —make sure to check out the open positions here.
Let’s go!
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