When we first met Lyndon Brown and Tony Meehan, the co-founders of Prequel, we knew their passion for solving real-world problems in software reliability was palpable, and their deep expertise was one of a kind.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Work-Bench has led Prequel’s $3.3M Seed round, with participation from Runtime Ventures, Operator Partners, and founders of category-defining infrastructure companies including Shay Banon (CTO, Elastic), Jon Oberheide (CTO, Duo Security), Monica Sarbu (CEO, Xata), and Andrew Morris (CTO, GreyNoise).

This investment was a long-time in the making. We first connected with Lyndon back in 2017 at a cybersecurity conference when he was at Endgame and have stayed in touch with him he’s taken on executive roles at companies like Verodin/Mandiant (acquired by Google). When Lyndon had the itch to build something new alongside his longtime teammate Tony from Endgame, we couldn’t wait to hear what they had in mind.

It’s rare to find a team that not only brings a groundbreaking idea, but also the perfect blend of experience to execute it. Lyndon and Tony have over a decade of expertise in security detection and response, with additional experiences performing vulnerability discovery at the National Security Agency (NSA), and leading engineering teams at Elastic. But what truly sets them apart, is their genuine drive to make life easier for DevOps and SRE teams — a mission that resonates deeply with us at Work-Bench.

The Problem

As software applications become more complex, DevOps and SRE teams struggle to keep everything running smoothly. Even with sophisticated observability and application performance management tools, several key problems remain:

1. Expertise limitations and bottlenecks: Increasingly component-rich stacks lead to mile-wide, inch-deep expertise within infrastructure teams, with 80% of code written by 3rd parties.
2. Siloed teams: Complex, distributed architectures lead to blurred lines of ownership, communication gaps, and fragmented collaboration, delaying problem identification and resolution. 
3. Alert, data, and dashboard overload: An explosion in application telemetry (i.e. logs and metrics) leading to terabytes of disconnected data, most of which is never used and increasingly expensive to transport and store.  
4. Incident-driven problem detection: Internal alerts and dashboards designed to avoid repeating yesterday’s incidents, leaving customers as the primary technique for discovering new ones.
5. Manual instrumentation: Existing tools often require custom code instrumentation, making the process of gaining visibility time-consuming and error-prone for developers.

The Solution

Prequel is a problem detection and management platform that harnesses precision identification and resolution to DevOps and SRE teams. 

A key feature of Prequel's solution is its out-of-the-box detection library. Inspired by the team’s best practices from the security world, Prequel offers a constantly-updated feed of predefined rules that quickly and effectively pinpoint specific reliability and performance issues. Powered by their open problem detection community, detect.sh, and the world’s first reliability research team, Prequel’s library covers issues in open-source software, misconfiguration, and developer-introduced bugs/antipatterns. 

Another crucial aspect is Prequel's eBPF-powered instrumentation. By utilizing eBPF and other technologies, Prequel delivers deeper reliability insights without requiring code modifications, a fact which minimizes deployment overhead and simplifies the instrumentation process. 

Additionally, Prequel adopts a real-time edge-based architecture. By deploying problem detection at the edge, this detection engine provides quicker, more specific insights when compared to traditional external, batch-driven systems, while significantly reducing cloud egress and storage costs.

Why We're Excited

Prequel's approach aligns perfectly with our vision for the future of cloud operations and software reliability. 

We believe their solution has the potential to dramatically reduce incident detection and response times, while lowering the total cost of ownership for observability tools. 

Prequel's technology provides deeper, more actionable insights into system behavior, enabling informed decision-making. By connecting the dots up and down the stack, it bridges the gap between development and operations teams, fostering better collaboration. 

The Prequel team's combined background in engineering high-availability cloud applications and leveraging global intelligence to solve hard problems in security gives them a unique vision for how DevOps and SRE teams can thrive in complex cloud environments.

Prequel is seeing traction across a variety of high-availability verticals, including FinTech, Infrastructure, and SAAS. 

Obsessed with their customers, they insisted on in-person kick off meetings for all of their early customers. A fun example of the team’s creativity was their first enterprise deployment at  Schrodinger. To make a lasting impression, they brought a trophy for "customer of the year", to reward months of feedback and set the tone for an engaging and memorable relationship. It’s these kinds of thoughtful touches that make this team stand out, and we’re excited to see what comes next.

Looking Ahead

In the coming years, we expect Prequel to become an indispensable part of the modern software development lifecycle. Helping teams prove that their applications are production-ready, preempting incidents, and optimizing the troubleshooting experience. 

Most importantly, we are excited by their vision of becoming the gold standard for taxonomy-driven problem detection approaches to measuring resiliency and hunting for runtime software failures before customers notice.

Congratulations to the entire Prequel team. With their distributed roots across Washington, DC. and Tulsa, Oklahoma, they are building an awesome team of experts in software reliability and problem detection. If you're passionate about revolutionizing DevOps and SRE practices, leveraging cutting-edge technologies like eBPF, or building the next generation of cloud reliability tools, reach out to the team to learn more.  

We're lucky to get to drive the next big trend in developer tools with this team, while also sharing some great memories – from enjoying Korean BBQ in K-Town (a true rite of passage for Work-Bench friends!) to indulging in solid Indian food during our board meeting trip to DC. We’re excited about our future visit to Tulsa, where Tony swears the food scene beats both NYC and DC combined. 

Stay tuned for more updates as Prequel continues to revolutionize problem detection and management for high-velocity cloud-native teams. 

Read more about Prequel in TechCrunch and on their blog.