Founder of Lijit raises $1.58m for VictorOps, service to help ops teams manage talent resources

Todd Vernon, the founder of Lijit Networks, the advertising services, audience analytics, and publishing service, has raised $1.58 million in seed funding for his new stealth startup. The Foundry Group is leading the round with participation from Tango Investments, Vernon, and his two other co-founders, Bryce Ambraziunas and Dan Jones.

While it still considers itself a stealth startup, what it is saying is that the company is called VictorOps. This is Vernon’s third startup following the acquisition of his last one, Lijit, by Federated Media. With VictorOps, Vernon, Ambraziunas, and Jones have set out to help find a way to keep software systems running in “today’s 24×7, technology centric businesses” by enabling the company’s most valuable assets: its people.

Problems with the 24 hour business cycle

Designed for small, medium, and enterprise SAS businesses, VictorOps believes that finding ways to control operations mediation is key. Companies that have Statistical Analysis Systems, or SAS, have a software solution that allows it to process data, manage reports, handle statistical and mathematical analysis, do business forecasting, oversee projects, and develop applications. VictorOps believes that these companies lose about 1% of their annual revenue due to service interruptions that require operations mediation. It doesn’t matter how good of an infrastructure a company has. Even with all the “appropriate levels of redundancy”, constant remediation is needed to provide 24×7 support to customers.

When remediation is required, companies need to have its teams on hand to fix the problem. Often, there are hundreds of these type of situations that require a company’s attention. And as they become more frequent, multiple teams are deployed to help solve them, requiring much more resources than should be needed. There needs to be a way to make this process more efficient.

VictorOps says that in the business era where more services are now on a 24×7 cycle, customers have expectations that services should always be on, available, and functioning. Companies have added detailed processes in place to help account for customer demands, but this has an unfortunately effect of being expensive, time-consuming, and inefficient.

VictorOps’s solution

To solve this, VictorOps is proposing its solution to help the operations team better manage their alerts. Through the use of what it calls a vertical collaboration platform (VCP), developer operations teams will be able to reduce their workload and help “save marriages one ops alert at a time.”

Through the use of mobile devices, teams can be alerted of any troubles in the system, get a view into the situational information flow, and what the point of interaction is to allow participation.

Building out the platform

With its seed investment, VictorOps will be able to build out its web and mobile VCP, something it says allows a company’s operations team to “effectively manage and remediate software system alerts and outages.”

The company is still being developed, but it says that any interested businesses eager to be Alpha testers should contact them.

Photo credit: KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP/Getty Images