Announcing our $4M Seed Investment from Redpoint Ventures

I’m excited to announce the public beta of Signadot and a $4 million seed investment led by Redpoint Ventures and participation by Y Combinator. We are excited to have a stellar group of investors including Adam Gross (former CEO, Heroku), Jason Warner (former CTO, GitHub), John Kodumal (Co-founder and CTO, LaunchDarkly), Timothy Chen (Managing Partner, Essence VC), Chris Golda (Founding Partner, Rogue Capital) and other strategic angels. Founded in 2020, our story began when I saw first-hand how my engineering team at AppDynamics was constantly forced to slow down because of discovering issues late in the development lifecycle. Digging deeper, I realized that this was because most of the testing happened in environments that were disparate from production.

With microservices in particular, testing can be a major challenge due to the increasing interconnectedness of different services; it’s challenging for developers to get a high quality testing signal earlier. Most of the testing happens in mocked environments due to which issues aren’t discovered until much later. The end result: longer feedback loops, delays in shipping features and bugs impacting end users.

I was talking to my friend and co-founder Anirudh, who was an early member of the Kubernetes team at Google, about what my team was experiencing, and we quickly realized that the struggles of my team at AppDynamics were extremely common. Being developers ourselves, we realized that the key to a significant boost to developer productivity is high quality feedback earlier in the development lifecycle. Companies like Google, Facebook, Uber and Lyft have developed internal solutions to the above problem and we wanted to level the playing field for everyone else. Driven by the vision to help developers, Anirudh and I joined forces and founded Signadot, a Kubernetes-based testing platform for Microservices.

Developers use Signadot SDKs to spin up virtual environments called sandboxes to test their services safely in a production-like Kubernetes cluster. By testing early in a high-fidelity environment, developers enjoy fast and high quality feedback. Signadot’s unique multi-tenancy model supports a large number of sandboxes in a Kubernetes cluster and scales well to large engineering teams. This enables developers to spin up sandboxes at the granularity of every pull request or commit.

We have companies with hundreds of microservices using Signadot to discover issues earlier and ship features faster. We have partnered with the best investors who believe we are in the early innings of cloud native software development and developer productivity tools.

Microservices are here to stay, especially as we build more complex software in the cloud. We envision a world where developers are free to be creative even in the face of growing complexity. This needs a new generation of tooling and we're excited to be part of that journey. Tomasz Tunguz, our lead investor from Redpoint Ventures said it best “It’s no secret that the future of software applications is entirely in the cloud. As cloud-native becomes the dominant software authoring framework, developers need the tools to ship quality code quickly. Arjun and Anirudh have precisely the right background to create the perfect solution to enable developers to test software safely in production. This is only the beginning of the company’s exciting journey.”

We plan to use this new investment to grow our incredibly talented team and keep building out our core platform. If you’re interested in joining our team and empowering developers building the next generation of distributed applications, please reach out to us at careers@signadot.com!

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