INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Chronosphere, a startup from two ex-Uber engineers who helped create the open-source M3 monitoring project to handle Uber-level scale,
officially launched today with the goal of building a commercial company on top of the open-source project.It also announced an $11 million
investment led by Greylock, with participation from venture capitalist Lee Fixel.While the founders, CEO Martin Mao and CTO Rob Skillington,
were working at Uber, they recognized a gap in the monitoring industry, particularly around cloud-native technologies like containers and
There weren’t any tools available on the market that could handle Uber’s scaling requirements — so like any good engineers, they went
out and built their own.“We looked around at the market at the time and couldn’t find anything in open source or commercially available
that could really scale to our needs
So we ended up building and open sourcing our solution, which is M3
Over the last three to four years we’ve scaled M3 to one of the largest production monitoring systems in the world today,” Mao
explained.The essential difference between M3 and other open-source, cloud-native monitoring solutions like Prometheus is that ability to
scale, he says.One of the main reasons they left to start a company, with the blessing of Uber, was that the community began asking for
features that didn’t really make sense for Uber
By launching Chronosphere, Mao and Skillington would be taking on the management of the project moving forward (although sharing governance
for the time being with Uber), while building those enterprise features the community has been requesting.The new company’s first product
will be a cloud version of M3 to help reduce some of the complexity associated with managing an M3 project
“M3 itself is a fairly complex piece of technology to run
It is solving a fairly complex problem at large scale, and running it actually requires a decent amount of investment to run at large scale,
so the first thing we’re doing is taking care of that management,” Mao said.Jerry Chen, who led the investment at Greylock, saw a
company solving a big problem
“They were providing such a high-resolution view of what’s going on in your cloud infrastructure and doing that at scale at a cost that
They solved that problem at Uber, and I saw them, and I was like wow, the rest of the market needs what guys built and I wrote the Series A
It was as simple as that,” Chen told TechCrunch.The cloud product is currently in private beta; they expect to open to public beta early
