Brad Smith and Jack McGlinchey knew there was a problem with connected operation tech stacks when they were working together at Gather.
Smith, who served as the director of revenue operations at the B2B SaaS company, approached McGlinchey about the problems he was facing with platform efficiency and process breakdowns.
"His response was great because he just laughed at me," Smith said.
It was the start of Sonar, a change management platform that brings DevOps tools to operations teams. Founded in October 2018, the startup offers companies a way to monitor and manage tech stacks and prevent complex software changes from leaving revenue-producing and operation teams dead in the water.
Borrowing words from another startup founder, Smith describes the issue like this: "Imagine trying to build or remodel or a house without blueprints."
"Our solution is geared toward anyone who’s leveraging tech stack," Smith said. "The better way of saying it, we are building technology solutions for people who are not technical."
Today, the company announced it has raised $1.6 million in funding led by Parade Ventures, with participation from Craft Ventures, Slack Fund, the VC fund for business communication platform Slack, and Marketwake Ventures.
"The overarching theme is that we really wanted to find the best investors in the world," McGlinchey said. "And with Slack, Parade, Marketwake and Craft on board as investors... They’ve obviously done it before."
The funding will primarily go towards hiring additional engineers, a sales team and continue to develop Sonar's brand presence, McGlinchey said.
"We have a lot of product to build," he said.
Slack, which began as a solution to solve communication problems among teams, had a particular interest in Sonar thanks to the line of communication they opened up with their solution, Smith said.
"These systems we’re talking about change all day, every day," Smith said. "There’s not a very good communication and documentation process with this. Things get lost, things break, make these systems not function. That resonated well with Slack."
Smith, who enjoys listening to podcasts like "How I Built This," said he always used to laugh when founders would say a majority of their solution was luck and about 1% skill.
"We closed our round March 6," he said. "That answer starts to resonate with me more and more. We talked about our work environment --- we were very close to signing a lease before everything happened."
The founders are staying opportunistic about the pandemic, noting that there's good talent available for hire, Smith said. The team will continue to work remotely, but the goal is to return to a physical space when it's safe to do so, he said.
"All of this happened when we were so small," McGlinchey said. "We didn’t have to change our DNA. Again, like Brad said, a lot of this was luck. We’ve been fortunate in that regard... It’s a hard, difficult time in a lot of aspects."
Quarter over quarter, Sonar is rapidly growing, with its latest growth metric at 176%, Smith said.
"It’s clear that our product is mission-critical," he said. "We wouldn't see the growth if it wasn’t. We know how valuable our software is to them and they know how valuable the customer is to us."
One way Sonar stays on top of problems operations teams face is a user community Smith and McGlinchey built alongside the company. By keeping the channel open, Sonar is able to hear direct feedback from marketing ops and SalesForce consultants to solve their problems, Smith said.
"Week over week, we understand what their challenges are," he said. "We get to read and understand what their pain points are."
McGlinchey said that while the team is ambitious to grow, they're sticking with the grow responsibly approach, a direct contrast to the "scale at all costs" philosophy that has caused many businesses to crash and burn.
"Building a sustainable company that also has ambitious growth has been popular recently," he said.
