Datree procures $3 mln seed

San Francisco and Tel Aviv-based Datree, a git-centric operations management platform, has secured $3 million in seed funding. The investor was TLV Partners.

PRESS RELEASE

Tel Aviv – August 29 – Datree, the first Git-Centric Operations Management Platform, today announced $3 million in seed funding from TLV Partners. Founded by Tel Aviv developers Arthur Schmunk, Eyar Zilberman and Shimon Tolts, datree fixes the challenges of DevOps scaling by cataloging an organization’s entire development stack, automating Git Operations tasks and preventing dangerous changes to applications and infrastructure. Datree has already secured top design partners including HoneyBook, SimilarWeb and PlayBuzz.

Agile and DevOps broke down software companies into small autonomous teams using different programming languages, multiple repositories and microservices. This helps make software development faster, more efficient and more creative.

However, autonomy comes with a price. Software teams often have no idea what code components other teams are using or who’s working on what; company standards become optional, because there’s no way to enforce them without excessive control; and CIOs, Software Architects and DevOps Managers have lost visibility into the company’s stack because it’s so distributed. Over time, these issues snowball, leading to inconsistent quality, security compromises, and even outages.

For many companies, Git has become the single source of truth for applications and infrastructure code. With ‘infrastructure as code’, even servers are software and are defined in Git repositories. Every developer can make code commits or pull requests that affect both applications and infrastructure stability and quality in production. Companies can have hundreds or even thousands of Git repositories, linked by a complicated network of dependencies, with automated processes building and deploying them into applications in ways that nobody fully understands.

Datree solves this problem. First, it scans and monitors all of a company’s public and private code repositories to build a 360-degree catalog of the entire company’s ecosystem: all the code components (open source and internal packages, infrastructure as code, cloud services and more), as well as people and repositories. Datree’s real-time catalog knows which people and teams work on which code components, and who are the in-house experts on particular tools and packages. All of this is accessed via interactive dashboards.

Next, datree’s smart policy engine helps developers work within an organization’s best-practice guidelines. Developers get real-time information and insights pushed to their existing work environment (eg the command line and Slack) to help them make informed decisions. Datree checks every pull request against user-defined policies and standards, and blocks risky code components, unstable versions, and unauthorized changes to ‘infrastructure as code’ and Git configurations.

“Almost every software company had a DevOps horror story to tell,” said Shimon Tolts, datree co-founder and CTO. “Software teams are drowning in repositories and code components. Companies with automated CI/CD pipelines and advanced infrastructures are still managing their repositories manually and tracking their code components on massive Excel spreadsheets. That’s not DevOps.”

Configs-as-code and automatic deployment have changed DevOps, explained datree CEO and co-founder Arthur Schmunk. “Even among the software giants, a typo in a configuration file can cause huge infrastructure outages. One company told us that a minor change to a template file on Git removed their whole application’s security systems by mistake due to automated deployment. Datree would prevent a change like that from being merged in the first place.”

“DevOps is broken,” continued Arthur Schmunk. “Nobody knows what’s going on it’s too easy to break something. If ‘Everything is Code’, the answer to all of these problems must be in the repositories and the code they contain.”

“The rise of DevOps means developers are more autonomous,” says Rona Segev, the managing partner of TLV Partners. “But it also means they use more third-party tools, services, internal packages and open source software. These multiple ‘Shadow Tech Stacks’ create a jungle with no internal oversight or cross-team collaboration. Organizations want to do DevOps while maintaining standards and best practices, and without losing the innovation and speed brought by developer freedom. This is what datree brings, and that’s why we are so excited to partner with them.”

“Developers want freedom but also want to do their best work,” said datree CPO and co-founder Eyar Zilberman. “They want to follow company standards but in a decentralized world, it’s impossible to keep up with the sheer amount of information. They want to move fast, but they don’t want to bring down their company’s whole service because they missed a line in a config. Datree’s insights make developers feel more connected and informed, and our smart policies give them a safety net, letting developers and organizations do DevOps with confidence.”