Cortex Raises $15M Series A to Simplify Microservices Management

Cortex Secures $15 Million in Series A Funding

Cortex, a company focused on enhancing visibility and development practices for engineering teams managing microservices architectures, has announced a $15 million Series A funding round. The investment was spearheaded by Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital, the latter of which also led the company’s initial $2.5 million seed funding round.

Investor Participation

Several angel investors contributed to this funding round, including Gokul Rajaram, Peter McKay, CEO of Snyk, and Mathilde Collin, co-founder and CEO of Front.

Customer Growth and Current Clients

Cortex reports a tenfold increase in its customer base since its launch in May 2021. Notable current customers include companies such as Grammarly, 8×8, and Rappi.

Building a System of Record for Engineering

The core objective of Cortex is to establish a comprehensive system of record specifically tailored for engineering teams utilizing contemporary development methodologies.

The Services Catalog

At the heart of Cortex’s offerings lies a services catalog, which was the company’s initial product launch. The team is now actively expanding the functionality surrounding this central catalog.

“Once a comprehensive catalog of microservices is maintained, opportunities arise to implement valuable features,” explained Ganesh Datta, co-founder and CTO of Cortex.

Addressing Visibility Gaps

“Engineering leaders often lack sufficient insight into team performance and resource allocation concerning key initiatives, reliability, and security protocols,” stated Anish Dhar, co-founder and CEO of Cortex. “Conversely, teams like SRE, security, and platform engineering frequently rely on inefficient tools like spreadsheets to track numerous services across multiple teams. Aligning these teams and ensuring consistency presents a significant challenge.”

The platform aims to provide engineering leadership with data-driven insights into service quality, while simultaneously empowering engineers with a clear understanding of available services and their current status.

Features and Integrations

Teams can leverage Cortex to define production readiness criteria, establishing checklists that services must meet before deployment. This can encompass elements like dashboards, alerting systems, and on-call schedules. These criteria are defined using the company’s Cortex Query Language (CQL).

Data Integration

Cortex integrates with approximately 30 widely used development tools, including GitHub, Bitbucket, Datadog, GitLab, Jira, SignalFX, and Kubernetes clusters.

Value Proposition

Bogomil Balkansky, a partner at Sequoia and a member of the Cortex board, highlighted the platform’s dual approach. “Cortex delivers value both from a top-down and bottom-up perspective. It provides engineering leaders with a framework for setting expectations and standards, while also assisting individual engineers and teams in tracking their progress.”

New Product Launches

Alongside the funding announcement, Cortex is introducing its Service Creation tool. This feature provides developers with a foundational template for new services, based on pre-defined organizational templates.

Enhanced Collaboration

New team features have also been released, designed to facilitate improved cross-team collaboration and streamline developer onboarding processes.

Industry Impact

John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global, commented, “Similar to how Salesforce transformed sales, Marketo revolutionized marketing, and ServiceNow modernized IT, Cortex is poised to do the same for engineering. It enables teams to establish and enforce best practices, fostering collaboration between engineering, SRE, security, and DevOps to deliver higher-quality services. Cortex cultivates a proactive culture focused on software quality and resilience.”