Today, we are excited to announce that Lightspeed is co-leading a $4M seed round in Polar Signals, along with our friends at GV. Polar Signals democratizes an observability technique called continuous profiling, which is more than a decade old, but has remained inaccessible to the average enterprise.
As investors and operators, we’ve been involved with 3 major companies in the observability space (Grafana, Elastic, and Splunk) and fully believe that the 3 pillars of observability (logs, metrics, and traces) are ‘table stakes’ in any company’s observability strategy. However, we have also become increasingly convinced that the three pillars are not enough for the future.
The reason for this is the ever-growing complexity of IT systems. Distributed systems, microservices, and dare we say it, Kubernetes itself, has created a set of interactions in the modern-day application stack that often leaves today’s engineers simply overwhelmed and still looking for needles in haystacks. Isolating a problem has become more painful than ever.
Polar Signals’ new open-source project, Parca, is built around the insight that developers will need to ultimately understand resource usage (eg CPU and memory) while code executes, and down to the line of code. Parca makes this accessible through a new storage layer that is optimized for continuous profiling data along with an agent that uses eBPF to achieve extremely low overhead. And much like Lightspeed’s investment in Grafana, Polar Signals fully embraces open-source and open standards.
The founder Frederic Branczyk has been deep in this world and ‘lived’ the problem at places like CoreOS and Red Hat while contributing to seminal open-source projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Conprof, and Thanos. There really is no one else better suited to solve this problem, and we at Lightspeed are honored to partner with him.
— Gaurav Gupta and Nnamdi Iregbulem
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