September 26, 2013

Victor Ops raises $6.5 million, plans move

BOULDER – Growth is happening rapidly for tech-startup VictorOps Inc., which announced a $6.5 million Series A round of funding on Thursday.

Boulder-based VictorOps, which launched in December, will use the money to continue scaling up the company in preparation for its general product launch late this year or early next year. VictorOps also announced that it will offer its software platform for free in a public beta phase beginning Tuesday.

VictorOps, founded by Todd Vernon, Bryce Ambraziunas and Dan Jones, is the creator of a software platform that helps development operations teams at software-as-a-service businesses manage and remediate software system alerts and outages.

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Costanoa Venture Capital led the latest funding round with participation from the Boulder-based Foundry Group, which was the lead investor in VictorOps’ $1.58 million seed round of funding last year.

Vernon, VictorOps’ chief executive, said Thursday that the company will move in February to a new location, about 8,000 square feet of space at 1401 Pearl St., above The Cheesecake Factory on the Pearl Street Mall in downtown Boulder. The company currently subleases about 2,000 square feet from Trada Inc., in the former Daily Camera building downtown.

“We’re planning for growth for sure,” Vernon said.

Vernon said he expects the company to roughly double its employee count of 17 by the middle of next year.

To this point, the company has been in development mode, with the last couple of months spent testing its product with an alpha group of about 20 mostly local companies, including the likes of Rally Software Development Corp., LinkSmart Inc., Federated Media Publishing Inc. and Gnip Inc.

The beta phase will give VictorOps a larger customer base from which to solicit feedback and increase the different kinds of data feeds that can be input.

For development operations teams, the software means the potential for more efficient response and less intrusion on their work or free time since software problems can crop up around the clock.

The way it works is a client’s enterprise monitoring system sends strains of data about system alerts or outages to VictorOps. That information is then broadcast to the client’s development ops people via Android, iPhone or web-based applications. That way everyone sees the information in real time for quicker diagnosis and remedy of the problem. VictorOps’ system can also help route the alerts to the client’s person or people most likely to have expertise about a given issue. For the client business, it all means less downtime and thus less lost revenue.

“We try to attach the right person to the right problem and strip out all the noise,´ said Vernon, who co-founded Boulder-based Raindance Communications Inc., a web-conferencing company that was sold to West Corp. in 2006, and Lijit Networks Inc., an online advertising company that was sold to Federated Media Publishing in October.

The full-featured beta product is offered to companies free of charge until the general launch, at which point Vernon said clients can convert to paying customers or, mostly for smaller companies, convert to a subset of features that will remain free.


BOULDER – Growth is happening rapidly for tech-startup VictorOps Inc., which announced a $6.5 million Series A round of funding on Thursday.

Boulder-based VictorOps, which launched in December, will use the money to continue scaling up the company in preparation for its general product launch late this year or early next year. VictorOps also announced that it will offer its software platform for free in a public beta phase beginning Tuesday.

VictorOps, founded by Todd Vernon, Bryce Ambraziunas and Dan Jones, is the creator of a software platform that helps development operations teams at software-as-a-service businesses manage and remediate software system alerts…

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