The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Financial decision · 2012–2016
Sentry, the open-source crash reporter, raises a $9M Series A from NEA and Accel
Sentry turned Disqus's internal error logger into an open-source crash-reporting product, then took a $9M Series A led by NEA in 2016.
Sentry
What the business is
Sentry sells real-time crash and error reporting for web, mobile and games: an open-source project plus a hosted SaaS priced by exceptions thrown, used by engineers at Square, Stripe, Dropbox, Opera, Uber, Airbnb and Postmates.
Starting capital：$1.5M seed from Accel in 2015, which grew the team from three to fourteen; then a $9M Series A led by NEA with Accel participating in June 2016, at a $40M+ post-money valuation, earmarked for growth and hiring.
How it started
Chris Jennings and David Cramer built Sentry as an internal tool for exception logging in Django applications while working at Disqus, which ran a blog-comment hosting service. Disqus open-sourced it, dozens of developers contributed code, and it grew to support Python, PHP, Java, Ruby, Node.js and JavaScript, with users including Twitter, Rdio, Pinterest, Path, Mozilla and Disqus itself. The open-source version was well received, but the team kept fielding requests for a hosted service, so the founders left their day jobs and launched one in 2012 with tiered pricing based on how many exceptions an application throws.
What happened
The hosted product became cash-flow positive and, by June 2016, had more than 5,000 customers, about one-third of everyone using Sentry including the open-source version. Accel provided $1.5M in seed funding in 2015, and the team grew from three to fourteen, hiring from Dropbox, GitHub and Disqus, including Cameron McEfee, previously GitHub's creative director. JavaScript became Sentry's top platform after more than tripling in a year, and the company said it was about to launch best-in-class iOS support with Unity coverage to follow. On June 23, 2016 it announced a $9M Series A led by NEA with Accel participating; co-founder David Cramer explained the decision: 'There's a lot of similar companies in the space. The sheer amount of competition forced us down the VC route.' Pricing was being overhauled to a team-based model, and the roadmap extended beyond crash reporting with the Breadcrumbs feature (the trail of user events before an error) and a User Feedback feature that would tie 500-error pages to Zendesk.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
Sentry began as an internal exception-logging tool for Django applications built by Disqus design director Chris Jennings and lead engineer David Cramer. Disqus released it as open source, dozens of developers contributed, and it spread across Python, PHP, Java, Ruby, Node.js and JavaScript, with companies including Twitter, Rdio, Pinterest, Path, Mozilla and Disqus itself running it. Because the open-source version kept drawing requests for a hosted service, the founders left Disqus and launched one in 2012, priced in tiers by the number of exceptions an application throws.
The hosted product became cash-flow positive and by June 2016 had more than 5,000 customers, about a third of everyone using Sentry including the open-source version. Accel put in $1.5M of seed money in 2015, growing the team from three to fourteen with hires from Dropbox, GitHub and Disqus, including Cameron McEfee, GitHub's former creative director. JavaScript became Sentry's top platform after more than tripling in a year, and the company was preparing what it called best-in-class iOS support, with Unity coverage to follow.
On June 23, 2016 Sentry announced a $9M Series A led by NEA, with Accel participating, at a $40M+ post-money valuation. 'The sheer amount of competition forced us down the VC route,' co-founder David Cramer said. The money was for growth and hiring, pricing moved to a team-based model, and the roadmap extended beyond crash reporting: Breadcrumbs reconstructs the user events before an error, and a User Feedback feature planned for Zendesk integration turns a 500-error page into a support channel. 'We've solved crash reporting,' Cramer said.
What has to be true
- Open source was the wedge: teams could run Sentry themselves and inspect the code, so it spread through Disqus, Twitter, Pinterest and Mozilla, and the hosted service became the natural paid upgrade.
- Pricing the hosted product by exceptions thrown tied cost to real usage, and the company reached cash-flow positive before taking any venture capital.
- Expanding horizontally across languages and platforms — server-side, browser JavaScript, embedded, then iOS and Unity — kept compounding adoption; JavaScript alone tripled in a year.
- The founder named competition, not growth, as the reason for raising: cash-flow positive was not enough against many similar companies, so Sentry took VC to hire and move faster.
- The next bet was adjacency: with crash reporting 'solved', Sentry aimed at customer support and the rest of product development through Breadcrumbs, User Feedback and a Zendesk integration.
What can be applied
Open source gave Sentry free distribution into big engineering teams; the hosted upgrade turned that reach into cash flow, and a crowded market is what finally pushed it to raise VC and expand.
Aftermath
As of 2016-06-23 Sentry was scaling: more than 5,000 hosted customers, a team of about fourteen, and a fresh $9M Series A at a $40M+ post-money valuation from NEA and Accel. The funds were earmarked for rapid growth and hiring; the announced roadmap was a shift to team-based pricing, iOS and Unity support, the Breadcrumbs event-trail feature (already live per the company blog in May 2016) and a User Feedback feature connecting 500-error pages to Zendesk. Cramer framed the round as the start of moving beyond crash reporting into other verticals tightly coupled to product development.
Sources
- Real-time crash reporting tool Sentry grabs $9 million from NEA & Accel
- Hacker News discussion of Sentry's $9M round
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