Our Series D in Sentry

I don’t have many good investment ideas and I’m not willing to rely on things like “hope” or “my intelligence” for coming up with more. So when I come up with a good one, I tend to stick with it. We first invested in Sentry in 2015 when we led the Seed round. We have since led or co-led the A, B, C and now the Series D. We’re quite happy the company keeps letting us invest more money.

It’s been ten years since I first heard about Sentry and it has always felt like a no-brainer to me as a product. I was an application developer and Sentry was a godsend. It gave me details about issues in my code before customers had to try (and struggle) to give me details about issues in my code :). And it was open source! I never felt locked in, I could patch things as needed, and eventually I could spin it up as SaaS so I never needed to worry about managing it myself.

Sentry always felt like a tool built for me, the application developer. Any frustrations I had with it were wishing it did more. Fast forward a decade and Sentry does a whole lot more! Along the  way it has maintained its focus on being the best friend to developers trying to better understand and improve their production applications for customers. We’ve talked about the exploding APX landscape, and as those developers become more and more important, it’s critical that their tools keep up. Some of my favorite improvements recently:

• Sentry continues to improve cross-platform support to make sure developers can use us in all of their applications and track issues across applications that work together and front-to-back end.
• Sentry launched Performance Monitoring and people love it. A broken site and a slow site are often similarly unacceptable to customers, now Sentry helps with both.
• Sentry launched Metric Alerts so that developers can be notified when performance issues, errors, etc cross unacceptable thresholds.
  

As with all things in a space that is changing faster than developers can build solutions, the opportunities for Sentry to go deeper and broader on all these issues is, well, nearly endless. 

But most importantly, I look forward to seeing what this remarkable team will pull off. I’ve known some of the Sentaurs for 7+ years now and I’m privileged to consider them friends and neighbors as well as colleagues. Sentry is hiring for a lot of roles in the Bay Areas, Toronto, and Austria and if you don’t do it for the product or the people… do it so you can enter the office to your own theme song…

—Dan Levine