DEVOPSdigest

Lightrun exited stealth and announced $4M in seed funding for the first complete continuous debugging and observability platform for production applications.

The round was led by Glilot Capital Partners with the participation of leading engineering executives from several fortune 500 firms.

Lightrun transforms production environments, making them completely transparent and covering all three of the pillars of observability. With a single click, developers can use Lightrun's IDE plugin to add log-lines, performance metrics and traces to code that's already running live in production, collecting the information needed to understand a problem and sending it to their IDE, APM or logging solution. To ensure stability and minimal performance footprint, Lightrun has developed a patent-pending sandbox to validate that there are no potential side-effects on the original application's behavior.

Many production issues are performance-related rather than logic bugs. Lightrun can insert new metrics, counters, traces, timers and measuring function durations in real-time, so performance and synchronization issues can be monitored to find live bottlenecks without affecting system performance.

Lightrun was founded by former Israeli champion 800m runner, and current developer, Ilan Peleg, who met his co-founder Leonid Blouvshtein at a bus station. They started Lightrun in mid-2019 after HPC expert Blouvshtein had designed a number of unconventional solutions to overcome the debugging challenges he encountered in his military service at the IDF's elite intelligence unit.

"Our ability to be agile shouldn't end just because the service is running," said Ilan Peleg, CEO and co-founder of Lightrun. "When developers can get 100% code-level visibility into production, it complements and enhances the CI/CD pipeline. For adding new functionalities, use CI/CD,for adding new logs and metrics in real-time, use Continuous Debugging and Observability."

To ensure enterprises and highly-regulated industries have complete control over sensitive code and data, Lightrun can be easily installed locally, in addition to a SaaS offering. Developers interact with Lightrun via a plugin in popular IDEs.

"Developers already live and work in their IDEs, so it's the natural place to use Lightrun to understand how the source code they're looking at behaves at runtime in a live application." said Lightrun co-founder and CTO Leonid Blouvshtein.

"We make a point of investing in technologies that transform big industries," said Kobi Samboursky, founder and managing partner at VC Glilot Capital Partners. "Lightrun is spearheading Continuous Debugging and Continuous Observability, picking up where CI/CD ends, turning observability into a real-time process instead of the iterative process it is today. We're confident that this will become DevOps and development best practices, enabling I&O leaders to react faster to production issues."

Lightrun is platform-agnostic, working on-prem, in the cloud, on containers, and on serverless code. Lightrun has already secured paid clients with their platform catering to major enterprises and Fortune 500s.