Checkly Secures $20M to slash website downtime with faster issue resolution

Checkly, a company in synthetic monitoring powered by Monitoring as Code (MaC) and Playwright, has raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by Balderton Capital. Notable contributions also came from existing investors Accel, CRV, and Paul H. Müller.

Founded in 2020, Checkly is committed to enabling engineers to detect and resolve issues ten times faster through a code-first approach. Their synthetic monitoring solutions empower engineering teams to proactively identify problems before users even notice. In today's always-on environment, quick issue detection and resolution are vital to avoid costly downtime and meet customer expectations. Despite this, many engineers lack access to comprehensive observability and monitoring tools, which often operate in isolation from the app or API code, leading to an average fault repair time of over an hour for 82% of businesses.

Integrated and Proactive Solutions

Checkly addresses this by integrating advanced, purpose-built synthetic monitoring tools directly into code repositories. Engineers can continuously simulate user interactions across more than 20 remote locations worldwide using automated Playwright scripts. This provides automatic, real-time alerts and detailed insights, helping developers turn alerts into actionable solutions. This unified approach reduces the delays and false positives common with older tools and empowers DevOps teams to fully own their service monitoring.

Developer-First and Cost-Effective

Checkly’s developer-centric approach is not only highly integrated but also up to 80% cheaper than legacy tools. The platform serves over 1,000 customers, with thousands of developers running 32.5 million checks daily. The platform has experienced threefold growth among enterprise clients. The monitoring and observability market, projected to grow 11.7% to $4.1 billion by 2028, underscores the critical importance of minimising downtime. Checkly has quickly become a formidable challenger to traditional systems, earning recognition as a Gartner Cool Vendor in 2023. Additionally, its MaC approach has been highlighted in Gartner's Monitoring and Observability Hype Cycle and SRE Hype Cycle.

Leadership and Future Plans

Checkly’s co-founders – CEO Hannes Lenke, Chief Evangelist Tim Nolet, and COO Timo Euteneuer – bring extensive expertise in software development and observability. With the new funding, Checkly plans to expand its teams, broaden its reach, and further develop its code-first monitoring platform to accelerate remediation times. This funding round brings Checkly’s total investment to $32.25 million, and Balderton Capital Partner Colin Hanna will join Checkly's board of directors, offering valuable insights and expertise to fuel the company’s growth.

Introducing Checkly Traces

Alongside the funding news, Checkly is launching its new feature, Checkly Traces, designed to speed up issue resolution by linking synthetic monitoring with tracing. This integration provides engineers with immediate insights into failures, eliminating the need for manual data correlation.

With these advancements and robust financial backing, Checkly is poised to continue its trajectory as a leading innovator in the synthetic monitoring and observability space.

Hannes Lenke, CEO of Checkly said: “Today, only a fraction of engineers have access to observability and monitoring tools, many of which don’t give modern development teams the insight, speed, scale or accuracy they need. At Checkly, we bring monitoring to where Engineering teams live and work – inside their code repositories. Monitoring as Code is the best way for teams to own and automate their monitoring. With our funding news, and the announcement that we’re uniting synthetics with  Checkly Traces, we’re thrilled to be able to continue empowering engineers to detect and resolve issues faster and easier than ever before.”

Colin Hanna, Partner at Balderton Capital said: "Checkly approaches monitoring and observability with a fresh perspective. Monitoring as Code means empowering developers to own the reliability of their services, APIs, and applications. This shrinks both time to resolution and the cost of observability. Some of the world's most sophisticated software companies, like Vercel and commercetools, appreciate the significance of this shift and are valuable customers. All of us at Balderton are deeply impressed with what Hannes and the team have already achieved and are grateful to be on the journey together.

“Using Checkly levels up your team to the point where it starts to feel like an unfair advantage,” said James Hall, Founder at Parallax. “We’ve had end-to-end monitors written on many projects, and the risk is they start to die and become unmaintainable. Part of that is because of difficulties unpicking what’s actually happening under the hood. Checkly Traces changes all that, making observability seamless and effective. It provides us with the necessary insights to pinpoint issues and optimize our caching strategy. The straightforward onboarding and automated trace correlation have made our troubleshooting process much faster and more efficient.”