Cortex Raises $2.25M Seed Funding - Services Catalog for Developers

Automated Service Cataloging with Cortex

Within the realm of cloud native development, a significant challenge arises from the multitude of services utilized in application creation. While service meshes manage service interactions, tracking the services a development team employs is often a manual process, typically relying on spreadsheets.

Cortex, a recently established startup, addresses this issue by offering a solution to automatically generate a catalog of services.

Seed Funding and New Features

The company has secured $2.25 million in seed funding led by Sequoia, with additional support from Y Combinator and prominent figures in the technology sector.

Alongside this investment, Cortex has unveiled several key feature enhancements.

The Origins of Cortex: Addressing a Developer Pain Point

Anish Dhar, co-founder and CEO of Cortex, draws upon his experience as a developer at Uber to illustrate the problem his company solves.

His previous team dedicated considerable time and resources to maintaining an accurate inventory of the 200-300 services they utilized, documented in Excel spreadsheets.

This involved determining service ownership and ensuring adherence to security and operational standards – a task universally disliked within the team.

“The core issue stemmed from outdated data and the need for SRE teams to repeatedly request updates from engineers,” Dhar explained. “This created obstacles in incident response and hindered overall engineering efficiency.”

Consequently, Cortex was initiated late last year to alleviate these challenges.

How Cortex Works

The tool functions by integrating with existing development platforms, such as Jira and DataDog.

It then consolidates information from these sources into a centralized catalog accessible to the entire team.

Company History and Growth

Dhar, along with co-founders Ganesh Datta and Nikhil Unni, launched Cortex in October 2019.

The subsequent months were dedicated to product development, culminating in a launch in March 2020.

Participation in the Y Combinator program during the winter of 2020 proved beneficial, coinciding with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Introducing Scorecards and Cortex Query Language

Building upon the initial funding round, which concluded last year, Cortex has introduced Scorecards.

This feature empowers engineering managers to enforce best practices across services.

Furthermore, the company has released Cortex Query Language (CQL), enabling organizations to define service development rules using mathematical expressions.

These rules, and the extent to which service owners comply with them, form the basis for the scores displayed on the scorecards.

Sequoia’s Perspective

Bogomil Balkansky, a partner at Sequoia, who will join the Cortex board, highlights his firm’s confidence in the growing trend of microservices.

He emphasized the Cortex team’s focus on a previously overlooked pain point for developers.

“My conviction in the necessity of a product like Cortex was immediate upon meeting the team,” Balkansky stated.

Future Plans and Company Culture

Currently, Cortex operates with a small team of two full-time engineers alongside the founders.

The company intends to expand its workforce to 10-15 employees by the end of 2021.

Dhar underscores the importance of diversity and inclusion as core values, aiming to cultivate a diverse company culture.

“A team comprised of individuals from varied backgrounds is crucial for developing a superior product,” he noted. “This is a constant consideration in our hiring practices.”