Shoreline founder and CEO Anurag Gupta was in charge of infrastructure at AWS for eight years prior to launching his company. He was responsible for making sure there were systems in place to respond to incidents that slowed down or brought AWS systems to a halt.
It was a big job, and while he helped build internal systems to automate incident response, he saw a dearth of tools in the marketplace to help other companies achieve this. While there were tools for testing and deploying software, monitoring it in production and managing incidents when they happened, there was a missing piece in his view.
He pointed out that once the incident ticket gets generated and the necessary people are at the table, figuring out what’s wrong and fixing it typically becomes a very manual process. And every minute the system down is costly. As software and systems become increasingly complex, it becomes ever more difficult for site reliability engineers (SREs), who are responsible for dealing with these issues, to figure out the root cause and fix it.
“In almost all cases, it becomes a manual process, and that’s where people burn out. That’s where they make mistakes. That’s where there’s a big labor-intensive effort. And that’s also where you have downtime because people take a long time to fix something versus a machine,” Gupta explained.
The company has created Jupyter-style notebooks to document and automate the response to common problems for a given system, providing step-by-step instructions for solving an issue, while automating the response whenever possible. The goal is to help ease the stress of reacting in the moment.
Gupta said the SRE function is growing exponentially to keep up with the increasing need to solve system problems as they happen, but he said that simply throwing bodies at the problem is not a sustainable approach.
George Mathew, managing partner at Insight Partners, whose firm is investing in Shoreline, said it’s about having machines and humans working together to solve problems faster.
“But then the enablement of higher level functions to be done by humans and lower level functions to be automated by machine learning algorithms is a compelling opportunity that we saw in this space,” Mathew said about why he invested in the company.
The company launched in 2019, but it took two and a half years to build an automation solution like this, financed by a $22 million Series A. The product has been in the market for about six months, and Shoreline already has almost 50 employees.
As Gupta builds the company, he said having a workforce that reflects the world in which it operates is a key goal for him.
“I’m a strong believer that the people in the company should look like society at large, not the tech society, because that already has systemic bias in it,” he said. That means trying to achieve percentages of employees that match actual population percentages.
“I believe as a sort of a constant is that if you bring in a diversity into your hiring process, you’ll end up with diversity in your company,” he said.
Today Shoreline announced a $35 million Series B led by Insight Partners with participation from Dawn Capital. This investment brings the total raised to $57 million, according to the company.
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