Our Continued Support of Sentry

Sentry announced its Series B. Accel is investing again, upping our stake even further. We are proud to be the company’s largest shareholder. Sentry announced the funding a couple of months ago, but I was about to welcome my first child and didn’t get a chance to organize my thoughts until now.

Sentry is a development team’s best friend. With minimal effort, Sentry monitors an application, sending issue-alerts to the right team members, encouraging collaborative investigation and resolution of those issues. Sentry lowers mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) so that developers focus on the fun parts of their job while giving customers a phenomenal product experience. And Sentry is open-source. You don’t need to worry about lock-in, or the product only being SaaS; if you need a feature or bug-fix, just submit a PR on Github.

Accel led the Seed in Sentry more than three years ago. Back then, Sentry was a side project whose creators (from Dropbox and GitHub) had just gone full-time on it. The entire team consisted of three people and the product was great, but there weren’t enough people to maintain it, much less add client support for new languages or platforms. The team couldn’t always get to support tickets on time, and if you wanted to talk with someone at the company before buying, you were mostly out of luck. At the time, if you wanted to pay Sentry a lot of money, you couldn’t even do that as they hadn’t set up invoicing!

Now, Sentry is the dominant cross-platform error tracking tool, much larger than alternatives we were neck-and-neck with back then. In addition to its most-popular SDKs for JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, and Node, Sentry supports mobile, Java, .NET and C#, Rust, Elixir, and pretty much every other framework and language under the sun. Platform support is improving further every day. The team is close to 100 strong and hiring in the U.S. and Austria. Sentry has wonderful support, sales, and customer success people to better serve its customers. Most importantly, there is invoicing so you can pay as much as your heart desires for Sentry (:P). There are more than 10,000 customers, with 500,000 total users sending over one billion errors per day. It’s a pleasure to handle them all!

Going forward, Sentry is doubling down on being a development team’s best friend. They want to help teams find, diagnose, and fix errors even faster with deeper data about each issue. Sentry will also begin to help developers with more than just straightforward errors. If something hurts your customer’s experience, Sentry wants to help you fix it. They’re calling it APM for Developers, and they really, really mean it.

Sentry was the first investment I led, and it has been a joy. We at Accel are thrilled Sentry let us join the ride three years ago and are excited for what the future holds.