Startup BigPanda Launches with $7 Million Series A

BigPanda will use data science to help IT automate incident response management

Startup: BigPanda

What they do: Use data science to help IT teams automate the manual and time-consuming processes involved in responding to thousands of daily IT issues.

Headquarters: Mountain View, CA 

CEO: Assaf Resnick.  He was previously an investor with Sequoia Capital.

Founded: 2012

Funding: In October, BigPanda locked down a $7 million Series A round of funding, led by Mayfield with participation from Sequoia Capital (which previously led a $1.5 million seed round). This latest round brings total funding to date to $8.5 million.

Problem they tackle: The typical IT professional must grapple with 5+ different monitoring tools that generate thousands of IT alerts. IT then needs to manually connect the dots between those alerts, figure out what critical incidents are affecting their business, and then manage the process of fixing them. It’s a highly manual process that is expensive, time-consuming and error prone. Worse, this process keep IT teams stuck in a perpetual fire-fighting mode, where they rarely have time to strategize or proactively pursue goals that better serve the bottom line.

Please Tweet: Startup BigPanda Launches with $7 Million Series A; Automates IT Incident Management. http://wp.me/p330ZZ-1N

What I like about them: We’re clearly in the age of analytics, and the best business-case for analytics-based startups is to focus on pressing headaches that people desperately want to solve, but really have no good options to do so.

BigPanda’s platform analyzes the flood of alerts that IT teams face every single day and clusters them into high-level incidents; it then automates the manual processes involved with detecting, investigating and collaborating around every IT incident. This enables companies to resolve IT issues faster and minimize their impact on customers and revenue.

Competitive Landscape: According to a BigPanda spokesperson, the competitive landscape is crowded with ticketing and workflow tools that IT teams are using to manage their IT incidents. These includes JIRA, Zendesk, Remedy, and ServiceNow.  BigPanda argues that those tools weren’t built to handle the scale and complexity of modern Ops, and don’t enable the use of algorithms to do the heavy lifting.

Customers Include: Dropbox, Taboola, and Wix.

Key Differentiator: Against legacy tools, BigPanda believes it has an edge because legacy solutions focus on helping teams to organize and track their activities manually, but leave the heavy lifting of detecting, investigating and collaborating on alerts up to individuals.

Against other startups eyeing this sector, BigPanda thinks its advantage centers on its unique data-science approach to incident management. “That enables us to apply proprietary clustering algorithms to intelligently group low-level alerts into high-level incidents; and then automates the manual processes involved with detecting, investigating and collaborating around every IT incident,” the company argues.

Please Tweet: BigPanda launches, will use data science to help IT automate incident response management http://wp.me/p330ZZ-1N #startups