Today, Cortex is announcing a huge milestone - our Series A round. The $15 million in funding, co-led by Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital, will help drive our mission to transform how engineering teams build and deliver great software.
We founded Cortex after experiencing first-hand how broken engineering cultures have become. The trend of adopting microservice architectures has given individual engineering teams greater agility and independence, but these advantages come with serious organizational challenges. Information and context surrounding services becomes siloed within different teams and tools making it difficult for developers to have the context they need to confidently build new services and respond to incidents. Engineering leaders don’t have the context they need to properly make decisions and prioritize initiatives that will strengthen the team’s ability to execute. The cracks in the system result in outages, missed deadlines, security incidents, and developer turnover.
In an attempt to bring things under control, most engineering teams today spend an inordinate amount of time manually pulling data about their services and organizing it in spreadsheets in an attempt to drive initiatives that will improve service reliability and quality. The amount of time and effort SRE, DevOps, and Security teams can spend just collecting and organizing information is extraordinary, especially as organizations grow larger and have to manage hundreds of services maintained by hundreds of engineers. The painstaking process results in untrustworthy data that prevents consensus among engineering leaders and in a slow feedback loop that makes it hard to motivate organizational change.
At the start of this year, we launched Service Catalog and Scorecards to allow engineering teams to organize their microservices and drive adoption of development best practices. The response from our customers has been incredible. By adopting Cortex, engineering teams at companies like Rappi, Grammarly, 8x8, and Clever have been able to largely automate the process of tracking and driving service quality. SRE, DevOps, and Security teams at these companies are empowered to drive organizational change and engineering leadership has the visibility into areas of risk they need to prioritize the right initiatives.
“Cortex has completely transformed the way we manage our microservices and make decisions as an organization. With Cortex’s service catalog, we are no longer dependent on manually pulling data into spreadsheets and tribal knowledge to understand the status of our services. The result has been improved reliability of our product and the ability to ship software with confidence more quickly.”
-- Rafael Garcia, CTO of Clever.
Alongside our funding announcement, we are excited to share two new major features that allow engineering teams to build stronger cultures that are prepared for the challenges facing them:
Service Creation allows developers to scaffold new services in five minutes based on templates defined by the organization. By utilizing templates, organizations can ensure services meet consistent development standards even as new projects start and new hires onboard.
Cortex Teams helps create high-performing engineering cultures by driving collective ownership of services and pride in service quality. By utilizing Teams, organizations better motivate developers to care and improve the services they own and become resilient to inevitable developer turnover.
What’s Next for Cortex
This is just the beginning of Cortex and we are so excited for what’s to come. Here’s what you can expect from us:
1. Improving and expanding the Cortex platform
We have a huge list of feature requests and product ideas we’re working on. We’ll be growing our engineering team and working to build new ways to help our customers win.
2. Make it easier for everyone to adopt Cortex
We’re investing in making it easier to get started with Cortex. This means improvements in-app to help onboard new teams and new developers. We will be building out our documentation and providing deeper use case guides to help our customers start driving the outcomes they need.
3. Bring Cortex to every engineering team around the world
We are so inspired by our customers and the amazing engineering team cultures they are building. We are excited to work with more engineering teams and grow the Cortex community.
If you think Cortex might be able to help you and your team, schedule a demo with us here. Also, we’re hiring! If our mission inspires you, check out our open positions.
