Our investment in Middleware - Bringing observability up to speed
AI-based full stack observability platform which allows the dev and ops teams to debug issues faster by bringing all the metrics, logs, traces, and events to a single unified timeline.
Note: Attack Capital is an investor in Middleware through our Demo Day Fund.
TL;DR: If you only have a couple of minutes.
Founder's Insight: Laduram Vishnoi, founder of Middleware is a second time founder who previously raised a $45M Series B led by Tiger Global for Acquire, a customer engagement platform. His frustration with the high costs of cloud observability tools at his previous company formed the basis of Middleware, which he founded with a personal investment of $500,000 before raising a single dollar from outside investors.
Challenges Addressed: Traditional observability tools fall short for microservices, leading to inefficient troubleshooting and high costs. Middleware provides a comprehensive and unified solution.
The Middleware Way: A unified observability platform for cloud-native, microservices, and distributed apps, Middleware uses AI-powered algorithms to detect potential problems, offers comprehensive monitoring, and is vendor agnostic through Open Telemetry.
Progress: Middleware, is part of the YC Winter 23 Batch, and is running POCs with companies like Akamai and Japan Exchange Group (JPX).
The biggest cost after cloud is observability.
Laduram Vishnoi, Founder of Middleware
Laduram Vishnoi, founder of Middleware, has a history of entrepreneurial success. He previously founded Acquire, a customer support platform that unifies digital channels and automates inquiry routing. After raising $45 million in a Series B funding round for Acquire, Vishnoi decided to take a break from day to day operations and became President at Acquire.
However, the early stage entrepreneurial bug soon caught up with him. His first hand experience with high costs of cloud observability platforms and knowledge of the internal tools he built at Acquire formed the basis of Middleware— which he founded with a personal investment of $500,000 in late 2022 before raising any outside capital . He has since hired a team of 15 engineers and joined Y Combinator with a SOC-II compliant product, with live customers.
Middleware is a real-time observability platform that brings all the metrics, logs, traces, and events into a single timeline so companies can monitor their distributed apps and cloud-native platforms in real-time.
With Middleware, Vishnoi is also on-board with the AI revolution. Middleware’s AI-powered algorithms collect and analyze data from across the entire infrastructure to spot signs of potential problems before they even occur.
A QUICK RUNDOWN OF OBSERVABILITY
The current observability solutions need a bit of refresher because businesses use different technology compared to 2010 to build their products. The current observability stack is built to monitor monolith architectures, not distributed apps, and microservices.
The last three decades have seen transformation after transformation in observability, each generation has new problems to solve, opening the door for new companies.Â
On-premise cloud era led to a few companies like Solarwinds, BMC, and CA Technology. The cloud era (where AWS came in) led to the formation of new companies like Datadog, New Relic, Sumologic, Dynatrace, and Appdynamic. Now, the cloud-native era (starting in 2019-20) has resulted in another market shakeup.
Using age-old observability platforms in the new age businesses creates massive inconveniences, to say the least:
The current observability platform only provides surface-level information, making debugging issues extremely hard.
The cost to monitor everything in the infrastructure and applications very quickly adds up.
All the data live in separate apps like logs, metrics, traces, and events and can't correlate causation.
Engineering teams end up taking a needle-in-haystack approach to finding incidents and bugs because of the sheer amount of data that cloud-native produces - it is becoming more and more challenging to understand the problems with applications and infrastructure, which wastes countless engineering time and creates alert fatigue.
BRINGING OBSERVABILITY UP TO SPEED
Vishnoi and his team realized this problem while building his previous company Acquire, a unified customer engagement platform which he managed to scale to around 150+ employees and raised $57M from venture investors.Â
The Acquire team, while building out the backend, found it challenging to monitor microservices and Kubernetes, as there were no all-inclusive cloud monitoring tools available. To validate their problem, Vishnoi spoke to engineering and IT leaders at several other companies. After realizing that most of them were facing the same problem, Vishnoi, with a few of his engineering team members from Acquire, started building Middleware full-time.
THE MIDDLEWARE WAY
Middleware-a classic example of founders building a company to solve their own problem- is a real-time observability platform for cloud-native, microservices, and distributed apps that bring all the metrics, logs, traces, and events to a single timeline empowering dev and ops teams to find and debug issues faster.
Middleware's AI-powered algorithms also collect and analyze data from across the entire infrastructure to spot signs of potential problems before they even occur. This approach involves using machine learning algorithms to analyze large volumes of data to identify patterns that may indicate potential issues and AI-powered solutions to fix them.Â
The company is building a wide range of observability from infrastructure monitoring, logs monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), synthetic monitoring, database monitoring, and real-time alerting solution with cost-effective prices.
Middleware is vendor agnostic by using and contributing to Open Telemetry. The platform only stores data that you need to save on costs, and it also correlates the traces from the browser to the front and back end with logs and metrics.
THE THIRD TIME'S A CHARM
Laduram Vishnoi is an already 2X successful entrepreneur with a wealth of experience in building companies from the trenches. His last company, Acquire, raised $57 Million from investors like Tiger Global and Base 10 Partners to create a unified customer engagement platform.Â
He started Acquire in 2016 and ran it for the next five years. During his time as the CEO, the company worked with US Air-force, Samsung, Discover, Audi, and United. He handed the company over to his co-founder & COO, Amrit Dhangal, and took the role of the president to free up some time to work on his next company Middleware.
Based in San Francisco, Middleware is currently running a POC with Akamai and Japan Exchange Group (JPX). It is also a part of the YC Winter 23 Batch and started getting a lot of investor interest (and checks) weeks before the demo day - a fitting outcome for someone with Vishnoi’s pedigree and experience.
