Entrepreneur Jeff Martens is back in Portland and back with a new startup.
The new company is Metrist, an observability tool to give users insights on the health of the cloud and other services that a growing number of business-critical applications run on. Businesses frequently build apps on top of other apps that in turn run on data center infrastructure run by the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
The product is the result of Martens' work at bigger monitoring and incident response companies New Relic (NYSE: NEWR) and PagerDuty (NYSE: PD) — where he landed after his first startup CPUsage.
In addition to Martens, the startup is co-founded by Ryan Duffield. The two worked together at San Francisco-based PagerDuty. They have been working on the product for two years.
Metrist wants to bring more visibility and accountability to cloud vendors and other applications by helping software developers see the true reliability of the infrastructure.
“We look at a layer that is ignored (by the big observability players),” said Martens. He added that those other products can tell you when something is broken, but they don’t tell engineers whether it’s an internal problem or an external one.
While talking to site reliability engineering teams and others through his work at PagerDuty, Martens said he would hear again and again from customers about this missing piece of the puzzle.
“People would spend 10-to-20 minutes trying to answer the question (is the failure me or is it the cloud provider or an application),” Martens said. “That might not sound like much (time), but the average cost of downtime is $5,600 a minute.”
The product is available now and the company does have paying customers.
Metrist is based in San Francisco, but Martens, who is CEO, is based in Portland. He moved back to Portland from San Francisco in 2020. The startup has a team of 12 that is fully remote. Duffield, who is CTO, is in San Francisco plus there are employees in Southern California, across Canada and in Spain.
The startup has already raised $5.5 million across a pre-seed and seed round. Backers include venture firm Heavybit, which invests in developer tools; Morado Ventures, which invests in data infrastructure; Alex Solomon, co-founder of PagerDuty; and Scott Klein and Steve Klein, co-founders of statuspage.io.
“Metrist enables teams to proactively know when an external service is down, with the goal of avoiding or mitigating incidents stemming from dependencies. Metrist’s approach to third-party observability ensures teams know authoritatively when (service level agreements) are not met.” said Joe Ruscio, General Partner at Heavybit in a written statement.
Martens raised the rounds before the current slowdown in venture funding. One of the investors, Morado Ventures, is a firm that backed his previous startup. He stayed in touch with Managing Director Ash Patel and when he was ready to start Metrist, Patel was one of his first calls, Marten said.
He estimates he has two years of runway from this funding. Martens' vision for the company is to build a large independent organization. Ultimately, he thinks Metrist can be a third-party way to verify infrastructure and application vendors' reliability.
"We don't look at (Metrist) as real time monitoring and alerting. We are a data company. We have the best and most interesting data around the reliability of third parties," he said. "We want to be the FICO score of cloud reliability."
