Currently, developers use dozens of tools that need integration, cost a lot, or feel like they were designed decades back. Due to these factors, users take a long time to comprehend how to use these tools. This is where Czech-founded Better Stack comes into the picture by helping developers ship higher-quality software faster and cheaper than alternatives.
Now, the San-Francisco-based observability startup has raised an additional $10 million in funding from KAYA, a European early-stage investor and an existing investor. In addition, angel investors Aaron Levie (CEO at Box) and Kulpreet Singh (ex-UiPath) participated in the round.
The company previously raised $18.6M from early-stage VC Creandum (backed atla, Laka, and Unitary), KAYA, Susa Ventures, K5 Global, Credo Ventures, Lachy Groom, Ryan Petersen (founder of Flexport), Michael Stoppelman, Emil Eifrem (founder of Neo4j), Zach Sims (founder of Codecademy), Madhu Muthukumar (CPO at Notion) among others.
Leveraging the advances of the ClickHouse database and bringing enhanced collaboration, the European startup is now planning to invest aggressively into future growth. “KAYA has been tremendously helpful so far so I couldn’t be more excited to bring them onboard properly as a key investor” said Juraj Masar, co-founder & CEO, and shared that KAYA’s LP Aternus pledged to contribute a part of the investment proceeds to a non-profit use.
Figma-like collaboration for developers
Founded in 2021 by Juraj Masar and Veronika Kolejak, Better Stack combines monitoring, logging, incident management, status pages, and more into a single platform. It is touted to be 10x cheaper yet 10-100x faster than the alternatives. As per the company, customers can keep data in hot storage for longer, thanks to the ClickHouse database.
Better Stack also introduced Figma-like collaborative dashboards that re-imagine how engineers work together to resolve incidents fast.
Serving 200,000+ developers and 4,000+ customers, Better Stack is now an established alternative to the likes of Datadog, New Relic, and PagerDuty.
Veronika Kolejak, Better Stack COO and co-founder said: “Take 10 engineers off the street and ask them: are you fluent in Datadog Query Language, New Relic Query Language, AWS CloudWatch Query Language, PromQL, LogQL… and 9 out of 10 will say no. But every engineer knows SQL, which is why with Better Stack, we’re making it the querying standard for software observability. And this is just one of the decisions we made that makes us ‘just work’ for so many engineers.”
Juraj Masar, Better Stack CEO and co-founder commented: “We lived the daily struggles engineers go through at our previous jobs and with Better Stack we decided to solve at least some of them. We are simply engineers making the tools we always wanted to use.”
Tomas Hromada, Better Stack CTO added: “For us, developer tools don’t mean they can’t be beautifully designed or a joy to use. We think that all users, whether they are indie hackers or CTOs of large corporations, deserve a great experience. Developers do care about working with tools that focus on design and UX as much as they focus on functionality.”
Tomas Obrtac, General Partner at KAYA added: “The Better Stack team understands the inner workings of modern engineering teams better than anyone else. Their product is an obvious choice for fast-moving companies: 100x faster and 10x cheaper is an easy choice.”Basically, Better Stack is on a mission to help developers make the internet better. Right now, developers use many tools that are expensive, feel outdated, and take a long time to understand. Better Stack puts together monitoring, logging, incident management, status pages, and more in one platform. It’s much cheaper and faster than other options (about 10 times cheaper and 10-100 times faster). Plus, it lets customers keep their data in hot storage for a longer time, thanks to the ClickHouse database. It’s easy for engineering teams to use because it uses SQL for data querying.
