The recent outage affecting an AWS east coast data center impacted numerous businesses that depend on its services, notably including Roku, Adobe, and Shipt. Following the resolution of this event, the company undertook a thorough analysis of the circumstances. For many organizations, this process involves the laborious task of compiling data from a variety of internal systems, rather than utilizing a dedicated incident platform.

Jeli.io aims to transform this approach by offering a unified hub for incident analysis. Today, the company announced a $4 million seed funding round, spearheaded by Boldstart Ventures with contributions from Harrison Metal and Heavybit.

Jeli’s CEO and founder, Nora Jones, possesses significant expertise in incident analysis. She was instrumental in developing chaos engineering tools at Netflix and subsequently led chaos engineering initiatives at Slack. While chaos engineering focuses on proactively simulating potential incidents through system stress tests, unforeseen incidents inevitably occur. Jones recognized the valuable learning opportunities presented by these events, but observed a lack of automated methods for consolidating relevant data.

“During my time at Netflix before the pandemic, I came to understand that examining incidents as they unfold – such as disruptions to Netflix, Slack, or any other organization – is a powerful way to identify the gap between an organization’s perceived operation and its actual functioning,” Jones explained.

She realized the potential benefits of understanding the decision-making processes, the individuals and tools involved, and the lessons companies could derive from their responses to these high-pressure situations, their resolution efforts, and strategies for preventing similar outages in the future. Lacking suitable products, Jones began creating her own tools at her previous employers, but ultimately envisioned a more comprehensive solution.

“We launched Jeli to develop tooling that provides engineers with the insights they need to focus their investigations following incidents,” she stated. This is achieved by aggregating data from sources like emails, Slack conversations, PagerDuty alerts, Zoom recordings, and system logs – all information pertaining to the incident – and presenting key insights to facilitate understanding without the need for manual data collection.

Currently, the startup comprises a team of eight employees, with plans for expansion across all departments in the coming year. As she builds her team, she prioritizes the importance of fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce. “I am deeply committed to diversity and inclusion. It’s a principle that has been fundamental to my approach from the outset. Having experienced being underrepresented in organizations previously, I am determined to ensure inclusivity from the beginning, as it ultimately leads to a superior product,” she said.

The product is presently in private beta, and the company is collaborating with initial customers to refine the platform. The intention is to progressively onboard additional companies in the months ahead, with a broader public release anticipated sometime next year.

Eliot Durbin, general partner at Boldstart Ventures, shared that he initiated conversations with Jones several years ago while she was at Netflix, simply to gain insights into this field. When she decided to establish a company, his firm eagerly provided early funding, even before the startup generated revenue.

“Upon meeting Nora, we recognized her unwavering dedication to enhancing system resilience [...]. We had the advantage of knowing her for years prior to the company’s founding, making our investment a natural progression of an ongoing dialogue,” Durbin elaborated.