Helios, a Tel Aviv-based startup that aims to make it easier for developers to understand, troubleshoot and test their distributed systems during the development phase, today announced general availability and that it has raised a $5 million starting round. co-led by Entrée Capital and Amiti VC. A number of angel investors, including Benny Schnaider, Guy Podjarny (co-founder of Snyk), Adi Sharabani and Yair Amit (co-founders of Skycure), and Guy Fighel (GM at New Relic), also participated in this round.
“We want to help you as a developer – even before production – to speed up your development process, your problem-solving process, your testing process, because what we know today is developers really struggle with it. If you make a change in one place in your system, you don’t necessarily know how this affects the rest of your system,” Helios CEO Eli Cohen, who co-founded the company with CTO Ran Nozik, told me.
Because it is difficult for developers to understand how their code interacts with the rest of the system, the development process often slows down. Meanwhile, even a minor bug in one microservice or API can quickly disable a large distributed app.
The idea behind Helios is to help developers understand exactly how their code interacts with the rest of the applications. Using Open Telemetry, a collection of open source observation tools, Helios extracts distributed trace data from the application and puts it into context for the developer. That means they can iterate exactly how their code interacts with the big applications to, for example, find and reproduce problems more easily.
Image Credits: Helios
“Growing technology companies often struggle with scaling their cloud-native architecture,” Eran Bielski, general partner at Entrée Capital, said in an email. “Companies want to focus on building a successful business, but often the day-to-day work of developers is full of friction that slows progress. Helios’ focus on both developer speed and productivity is exactly what the market needs, and I have no doubt every software development company in the world will soon be adopting such a tool.”
The company’s Open Telemetry SDK currently supports Go, Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, and Ruby, and the service integrates with tools like Postman, building systems like Nx.dev, error monitoring solutions like Airbrake and Sentry, as well as data warehouses. such as Databricks and a number of popular observation platforms and testing frameworks. That should cover a lot of use cases, but with the new funding, the company plans to expand the number of integrations over time.
The service, which offers a free basic plan and paid plans starting at $99 per month, is now generally available. If you want to see what it looks like before you go all in, the company also offers an easy way to take a test drive in a pre-populated sandbox environmentsomething that many more companies should be doing.
