Avenue Launches Operations Observability Platform with $4M Funding

Avenue Launches Platform for Operations Monitoring

Avenue officially began operations on Friday, providing dedicated tools for monitoring teams. The company is developing a comprehensive “command center” specifically for this often-overlooked area of business, as explained by co-founder and CEO Justin Bleuel to TechCrunch.

Seed Funding Announcement

Alongside the launch, Avenue announced securing $4 million in seed funding. This round was spearheaded by Accel, with additional investment from Flexport and a collective of individual investors originating from companies such as Coinbase, Uber, Stripe, and Thumbtack.

Founders' Backgrounds

Justin Bleuel and Jeff Barg initially collaborated on iOS app development before pursuing separate career paths. Bleuel joined Uber, while Barg moved to Amazon.

During his time at Uber, Bleuel focused on observability – both passive and proactive monitoring – and played a key role in building internal tools to track marketplace data, including rider experience metrics.

The Genesis of Avenue

Recognizing a gap in the market, both founders envisioned creating these tools specifically for operations teams. This led to the creation of Avenue.

The platform empowers business teams to establish alerts for data anomalies, take appropriate action, and enhance overall team performance. Bleuel describes it as a “Datadog or PagerDuty for operations teams.”

Leveraging the Modern Data Stack

“Data is now largely centralized within data warehouses, enabling new possibilities for building and activating insights, similar to solutions like Fivetran,” Bleuel stated.

He further explained that, unlike the past, where alerts needed to be individually configured for each tool, Avenue allows for centralized direction from the data warehouse.

Early Success with Snackpass

Founded in 2020 and emerging from the Y Combinator winter 2021 cohort, Avenue has already seen success with early adopters. Food pickup service Snackpass utilizes Avenue to monitor uptime and receive alerts when restaurant partners experience issues like tablet battery failures or Wi-Fi outages.

This allows Snackpass to proactively contact locations and resolve problems, resulting in a 50% reduction in offline stores, according to Bleuel.

Diverse Applications

While marketplace companies and warehouses for stock monitoring represent Avenue’s primary customer base, the co-founders are witnessing broader adoption.

For example, furniture delivery companies are leveraging the technology to ensure reliability and track inventory levels. Customers are also utilizing the platform to generate reports and share operational insights with internal teams.

Future Plans

The company plans to allocate the new funding towards expanding its team, particularly in engineering, to accelerate product development and market entry, Barg noted.

Current Traction and Pricing

Avenue currently serves over 50 companies and has dispatched more than 200,000 alerts since April.

The company’s pricing model is based on a per-alert monthly fee, with plans to introduce a freemium option alongside enterprise-level offerings.

Accel’s Investment Thesis

Amit Kumar, a partner at Accel, explained via email that the firm operates with a “thesis-driven” approach, with the modern data stack being a key focus.

Accel previously invested in companies like Airbyte, Monte Carlo, and Privacer, recognizing the potential for new applications built upon this innovation, and identified Avenue as a standout candidate.

The Founders’ Unique Perspective

Kumar highlighted the “particularly compelling” combination of Bleuel and Barg’s experience, stemming from their backgrounds at Uber and Amazon.

Their firsthand experience revealed that operations teams were often “poorly served,” impacting overall business performance.

Addressing Inefficiencies in Operations

Kumar observed that current operational practices often rely on dashboarding, manual checks, and color-coded spreadsheets – a process he described as “often inaccurate and disorganized.”

He contrasted this with the robust tools available to product engineers for observability and incident response.

Positioned for Growth

“Given the emergence of ‘atoms’ startups led by former Uber and Amazon operators, Justin and Jeff were uniquely positioned to connect with early design partners and customers within their networks,” Kumar added.

He anticipates that as operations teams become increasingly vital, their processes will mature and benefit from dedicated tooling, and believes Avenue is well-positioned to capitalize on this trend.