Trendsonline broke the news that Danish startup Opbeat has raised over €2 Million (15 million DKK) in Series A investment, primarily from Balderton Capital.
Opbeat is a collaborative web operations platform, helping developers by giving them their own hosted Control Centre for managing day-to-day web operations. Techcrunch report that Opbeat co-founders and serial entrepreneurs Rasmus Makwarth and Ron Cohen say that the idea behind their new startup was born from the frustration of working at multiple tech companies (including several failed startups).
“We are Geckoboard for coders, but we’re just on a whole different level. All your data are collected and visualized somewhere, “said Rasmus Makwarth to Trendsonline last July.
Rasmus, in the Opbeat blog announced this week that the the team behind Opbeat are delighted to welcome Balderton Capital as investors. Balderton Capital are joining angels from Opbeat’s seed round; Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Facebook co-founder Andrew McCollum, former Spotify CTO Andreas Ehn, 23 co-founder Steffen Christensen, and Thomas Madsen-Mygdal.
Andrew McCollum says in another Opbeat blog piece that the advantage of these new tools and cloud platforms available to developers is that it’s now easier “to deploy and scale web than ever before.” As a result, many startups and founders are electing to “forgo a dedicated Ops team for longer,” instead leaving deployment and server management responsibilities in the hands of developers. Opbeat can help them “adopt some of the goals of rapid development and empowering engineers” that one usually only finds at larger, well-financed tech companies, and they should be able to “move faster and spend less time fixing things when they break.”
Investor Mike Krieger comes with a unique experience in relation to the product and was himself down in the engine room, since Instagram went from a garage startup to startup with millions of users.
“When I saw Opbeat’s model how they would solve developers’ daily challenges, so I was quite sure that it is here I just had to join in,” said Mike to TechCrunch.
Opbeat has been hyped right from the start and early seed investment from Thomas Madsen-Mygdal shortly after they had started, has given the startup the seal of approval, and the right traction.
“It’s about finding the others – and I am sure that we have found the right [way], that has a truly unique experience in ops, scaling and growth….. It shows what is possible today out of Europe – that a couple of guys from Copenhagen to attract the best in the world in their field.” said Thomas Madsen-Mygdal to Trendsonline.
Raising this amount of capital is great news for Opbeat. There’s much more for them to do, but for now, the co-founders say that their key focus is on developers in the U.S., where they see the largest need (and opportunity). Their new capital will help ramp up hiring and support Opbeat in doing some scaling of its own.