Big50-2017 Startup Spotlight: BigPanda

BigPanda

What they do: The BigPanda platform consolidates and correlates IT alerts from multiple monitoring tools into a single unified view that displays how various incidents relate.

Problem they solve: As application and infrastructure environments have evolved over time, IT incident response workflows and associated tools have not. As a result, IT Operations teams cannot keep up with the ever-increasing scale and complexity of the business critical services they are responsible for keeping up and running.

More specifically, as cloud, software-defined infrastructure, and digital business (e.g. mobile) have moved into the mainstream, IT Operations professionals have been forced into constant reactive firefighting. Adding to the problem are other current trends, such as micro-services, continuous delivery, and DevOps.

Backed by $56M in VC, #Big50-2017 startup BigPanda automates IT monitoring, root-cause analysis, and remediation. https://wp.me/p330ZZ-jI Click To Tweet

To put it simply: IT Ops professionals get too many alerts from too many places far too often to make sense of them. This signal-to-noise imbalance creates huge risks.

How they solve it: BigPanda uses algorithms to automate how IT teams manage the explosion of IT alerts and incidents they face every day. By intelligently routing and correlating massive volumes of IT alerts from fragmented clouds, applications, and infrastructure, BigPanda enables IT teams to cut through the noise and remediate IT problems faster and more efficiently. IT teams can either remediate problems directly in BigPanda’s Unified Console, or they can do so through bi-directional integrations with ticketing, on-call notification, and chat solutions, such as ServiceNow, PagerDuty, and Slack.

This approach not only provides engineers with a single pane of glass for alert management, but it also helps IT teams separate signal from noise in order to spot critical issues faster, identify root causes, and reduce MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution).

In 2017, BigPanda added new features to its Algorithmic Event Management platform, all of which are designed to help IT professionals avoid downtime, spot critical issues faster, and reduce MTTR. These features include unified search, incident dashboards, custom integration APIs, a custom notification API, cross-source correlation, and self-service correlation.

Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA

CEO: Assaf Resnick, founder and CEO. Assaf was previously a principal at Sequoia Capital and an analyst at Moody’s.

Year Founded: 2012

Funding: BigPanda is backed by $56 million in VC funding. In May 2016, the startup secured $5M in follow-on funding from Pelion Venture Partners, adding to its $16M Series B, which it announced in October 2015. Other investors include Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund, and Sequoia Capital. Mayfield Fund and Sequoia Capital also funded BigPanda’s $7M Series A.

Funding Update: Just as we were going to press, BigPanda locked down an additional $23 million in Series B funding – expanding the round to a total of $49 million. Leading this round is Greenfield Partners, a partnership backed by TPG Growth, with further participation by existing BigPanda investors Sequoia Capital, Battery Ventures, Mayfield and Glynn Capital.

Competitors include: Moogsoft, ServiceNow, and PagerDuty (although BigPanda argues that  ServiceNow and PagerDuty are really complementary tools.)

Customers Include: Intel, Cisco, Workday, AutoDesk, NewsCorp, Endurance, Getty Images, Shutterfly, TiVO, TopGolf, Gap, Turner Broadcasting, Macy’s, and Riot Games.

Why they’re in the Big 50-2017: BigPanda is a two-time winner! The startup’s funding, market positioning, and leadership team all work to their benefit. Locking down an additional $23M in Series B funding is a major boost.

But the biggest mark in BigPanda’s favor this year is the addition of several top-tier, on-the-record customers. Adding the likes of Shutterfly, TiVO, and Gap as named customers never hurts.