Prague-based Better Stack raises €18.2M to provide an improved observability stack for developers

Prague-based Better Stack, a platform building an improved observability stack for developers, announced on Thursday that it has raised $18.6M (approximately €18.24M) in a Series A round of funding led by Creandum. 

Creandum, founded in 2003, is a pan-European early-stage VC firm. Its portfolio of 120+ companies includes some of Europe’s most successful tech companies across a wide range of industries, including Spotify, Klarna, Depop, Kry, Trade Republic, Pleo, and Vivino.

Carl Fritjofsson, General Partner at Creandum, will join the board of Better Stack.

The round also saw participation from Susa Ventures, K5 Global, Credo Ventures, Kaya.vc, Lachy Groom, Ryan Petersen (founder of Flexport), Michael Stoppelman, Emil Eifrem (founder of Neo4j), Zach Sims (founder of Codecademy), Madhu Muthukumar (CPO at Notion), Tim Soulo (CMO at Ahrefs), Oskari Saarenmaa & Hannu Valtonen (founders of Aiven), and Lucek Samulowski (founder of Docplanner), among others.

Capital utilisation

Better Stack’s mission is to “help developers in building a better internet by making powerful observability tools that are beautifully designed and a joy to use.” This makes it easier to ship better and more reliable software faster.

The company says the funds will help it to support its continued growth and allow it to scale its product at a faster pace to help more developers globally.

“Radically better observability stack”

Developers now use a large number of complex, expensive tools that are old and take a long time for consumers to completely understand. This is where Better Stack looks to make a difference.

Founded in 2021 by Juraj Masar and Veronika Kolejak, Better Stack combines monitoring, logging, incident management, and status pages into one platform. The startup claims that it is nearly 10X cheaper, yet 10 to 100X faster than the alternatives, and customers are able to keep data in hot storage for longer, thanks to its ClickHouse database. 

Because it uses SQL for data querying, engineering teams find it easy to utilise. Lastly, the emphasis on Figma-style collaboration in Better Stack enables engineers to collaborate in real-time.

Major outages of companies like Atlassian and Cloudflare in early 2022 show that software reliability is still an unsolved problem. Better Stack arrives to help developers with this challenge. The company is used by over 70,000 developers and 1,400+ customers. Some of its clients include ESET, Decathlon, Time.com, Accenture, startups like Brave and Drata, and indie hackers such as Plausible or Buy me a coffee.

Co-founder Veronika Kolejak says, “Take 10 engineers off the street and ask them: are you fluent in Datadog Query Language, New Relic Query Language, AWS CloudWatch Query Language, PromQL, LogQL…and 9 out of 10 will say no. But every engineer knows SQL, which is why with Better Stack, we’re making it the querying standard for software observability. And this is just one of the decisions we made that makes us ‘just work’ for so many engineers.”

CTO and co-founder Tomas Hromada adds, “For us, developer tools don’t mean they can’t be beautifully designed or a joy to use. We think that all users, whether they are indie hackers or CTOs of large corporations, deserve a great experience. Developers do care about working with tools that focus on design and UX as much as they focus on functionality.”

About ClickHouse

A new type of analytical database called ClickHouse is 100X–1000X quicker than conventional methods. ClickHouse spun out of Yandex and raised $300M in 2021.

Uber engineering popularised the usage of ClickHouse in observability by installing it internally for log handling. Through its dependability platform offered as a SaaS, Better Stack is now providing the advantages of ClickHouse to everyone.