SAN FRANCISCO — Cortex announced it has raised $15 million in Series A funding co-led by Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital. The funding round also includes technology investors, founders, and business leaders participating, including Silicon Valley angel, Gokul Rajaram; co-founder and CEO of Front, Mathilde Collin; and CEO of Snyk, Peter McKay.
Cortex’s service catalog is the first system of record for engineering, enabling development of higher-quality software. It helps engineering leaders drive adoption of microservices best practices and gives them visibility into and control over all services. The company says it has experienced 10X customer growth since its launch in May 2021 and has been fully deployed across several unicorn engineering organizations including Rappi, Grammarly, and 8×8.
Software engineering teams today struggle to operate at scale. As companies grow, architectures become more complex and teams retract into silos. Tracking service quality and driving adoption of best practices using spreadsheets quickly becomes untenable. The cracks in the system manifest themselves as outages, missed deadlines, security incidents, and developer turnover.
“Today engineering leaders are under tremendous pressure to deliver innovative, reliable, and secure software,” said Cortex board member and Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky. “Cortex’s service catalog is the industry’s first system of record for engineering which gives engineering leaders the visibility and control they need to enable high performing teams and allows individual engineers to adopt best practices and be more productive without the hassle.”
“As Salesforce did for sales, Marketo did for marketing and ServiceNow did for IT, Cortex now does for Engineering,” said John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global. “Cortex helps teams set best practices and guidelines for development, making it easy for engineering, SRE, security, and Devops to work together to create higher quality services. Cortex orchestrates a culture change where engineering organizations become proactive in their approach to software quality and are resilient to the inevitable and constant changes that come with building software.”
Critical capabilities in the Cortex Platform include:
- (New!) Service Creation allows developers to scaffold new services in five minutes based on templates defined by the organization, ensuring services meet development standards and are properly catalogued from day one.
- (New!) Cortex Teams helps create high-performing engineering cultures by driving collective ownership of services, accelerating developer onboarding, and improving cross-team collaboration.
- The Cortex Service Catalog is easily integrated with engineering teams’ architectures and tools, making it simple for them to organize critical information about their services and understand their dependencies.
- Scorecards allow teams to define standards for their services, measuring things like production readiness and development maturity, allowing engineering leaders to understand areas of risk in their services and prioritize initiatives accordingly.
“Cortex has completely transformed the way we manage our microservices and make decisions as an organization. With Cortex’s service catalog, we are no longer dependent on manually pulling data into spreadsheets and tribal knowledge to understand the status of our services,” said Rafael Garcia, CTO of Clever. “Scorecards have given our SRE team and engineering leaders visibility into areas of risk and helped us drive organizational consensus on what initiatives to prioritize. The result has been improved reliability of our product and the ability to ship software with confidence more quickly.”
“We founded Cortex after experiencing the pain first-hand in large, complex software environments. Our mission is to make it easy for engineering teams to handle the scale of their service architecture, so they can focus on building great products,” said Anish Dhar, co-founder and CEO of Cortex and former engineer at Uber. “I have been humbled by the rapid customer momentum and transformational impact Cortex has had on the engineering culture and service quality of our customers. I am eager to continue working to bring the benefits of Cortex to more engineering organizations globally.”
