Ex-Google, eBay employees’ troubleshooting startup nets $21m in Accel-led round

“Despite six years of progress, Kubernetes is still incredibly complex,” said Drew Bradstock, product lead at Google Kubernetes Engine, in a February interview with The Register. He added that while companies have increasingly been using Kubernetes in the past year, they still “run headlong into difficulty.”

The Komodor team/ Photo credit: Komodor

Yet despite the software’s high level of complexity, household names such as Amazon, Azure, and DigitalOcean have offered its hosted versions. It is also one of the most popular projects on GitHub, which provides internet hosting for software development.

But what is Kubernetes really?

Kubernetes handles all aspects of an application’s lifecycle, which includes networking, load balancing, deployment, rollout, and scaling up and down. It also allows the usage of plugins on its platform, promoting convenience for users.

However, the software recently came under fire after Microsoft had warned users about an ongoing series of attacks that compromise Kubernetes clusters by deploying malicious containers that mine for Monero and Ethereum cryptocurrencies.

In an attempt to tackle the security and complexity issues of the software, Israel-based Komodor, a troubleshooting platform dedicated to Kubernetes, has launched itself out of stealth mode with a US$21 million fundraising round led by Accel.

Investors including GitHub chief technical officer Jason Warner, Atlassian chief technical officer Sri Viswanath, Snyk co-founder Danny Grander, Logz.io CEO Tomer Levy, and Aqua Security co-founder Amir Jerbi also backed the company in the funding round. 

“When on-call teams get a PagerDuty alert telling them something’s gone wrong, the first question they ask is ‘What changed?’ and finding the answer often involves logging into multiple tools and [doing] up to hours of detective work,” said Seth Pierrepont, partner at Accel.

Komodor offers contextual insights that help developers detect root causes to rapidly solve issues. It provides a unified view of all events across the entire Kubernetes stack, providing developers, operations, and on-call teams with the context and other actionable insights they need to solve issues efficiently and independently.

To achieve this kind of integration, the platform constructs a view of relevant deploys, configuration changes, dependencies, metrics, and past incidents by gathering data from cloud providers, source controls, CI/CD tools, databases, underlying infrastructure, monitoring tools, and incident response platforms.

Komodor was founded by Ben Ofiri and Itiel Shwartz. Ofiri had previously worked as the product lead for Google’s Duplex, the tech giant’s flagship conversational AI project, while Shwartz has been a software developer for eBay, Forter, and Rookout.