PagerDuty, a provider of application monitoring software, has just brought home to roost a $43.8 million Series C funding round led by new backer Accel, with further funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Baseline Ventures, and a second new backer, Harrison Metal.
PagerDuty swims rather successfully in the crowded pond that is the monitoring industry, where its main competition includes the likes of AppDynamics, BMC (formerly Boundary), New Relic, and OpsGenie.
PagerDuty, at its crux, is a response management technology company. As its name implies, it aims to keep the operations team and engineers informed of incidents ranging from daily disruptions to major P1 outages. These obviously have the capacity to lead to unexpected service downtime, which can in turn lead to reduced productivity or, depending on the systems, significant loss of revenue. Now, this is not really a unique selling point. All management products purport to offer this. If this were the only arrow in PagerDuty’s quiver, it would not have a very good product and wouldn’t have been able to raise such a number for its Series C funding round. Where PagerDuty excels is with the DevOps community. Its product empowers the developer to integrate monitoring directly at the heart of a product. This is why companies like Airbnb, Comcast, and Google are counted among its customers. Chief Executive Officer Jennifer Tejada said in an interview that PagerDuty has managed to “[develop] a cult-like following” within the DevOps community and now has more than 200,000 users, having increased its customer base by over 600 in the past year, “with no signs of slowing down.”
How Does It Make Revenue?
PagerDuty raises its revenue through a subscription-based model. Subscriptions range in price from $9 to $99 per user per month, depending on team size. Its Software as a Service (SaaS) offers both a tool that users can access via web, mobile devices, mail, or phone and a platform that integrates the organization’s existing developer tools into an incident response workflow. PagerDuty has 175 native product integrations with partner companies including ServiceNow, Splunk, and Slack.
Tejada said that with the new funds, PagerDuty “will continue building on the successful launch of our Operations Command Console with a number of new features and capabilities designed to meet the needs of developers, IT Operations, DevOps and business teams,” adding that they “also have plans to expand our growing integration partner ecosystem to ensure our users have access to the data they need and the ability to extend their incident resolution workflows into their favorite existing tools.” Further, PagerDuty is looking to move into new industries and geographies, as it is currently heavily dependent on the North America market.
PagerDuty has raised 83.6 million in funding over five rounds since its seed investment in 2010.