Thundra
A platform for monitoring, debugging and securing serverless applications such as AWS Lambda
- Founded
- 2018
- Closed
- 2023
- Lifespan
- 5 years
- Total funding
- $4 million
- Country
- Turkey
- City
- Ankara
- Sector
- Enterprise software (SaaS)
- Founders
- Serkan Özal, Berkay Mollamustafaoğlu
- Investors
- Battery Ventures, ScaleX Ventures, Growth Circuit, York IE, Berkay Mollamustafaoğlu, Catchpoint
- At its peak
- A team of 13 (Webrazzi, 2020)
- Cause of closure
- Acquired and shut down
What did it do?
Thundra was a monitoring, debugging and security platform that made the inner workings of serverless and microservice applications visible. Using agents added to AWS Lambda functions, it brought metrics, logs and traces together on a single screen, helping developers track down performance problems quickly. On top of a free tier it offered usage-based plans. In 2021 it added Thundra Sidekick, a feature focused on debugging.
Why did it shut down?
The sources do not give a detailed explanation of why Thundra ended its independent journey. In April 2023 the platform's website announced that operations had ceased, and a few days later Catchpoint said it had acquired Thundra's technology assets. The price was not disclosed; the team moved to the new centre Catchpoint set up in Ankara, and the technology was folded into the buyer's products. The sources for this entry contain no news of further investment after the $4 million round in 2020; as an interpretation, this suggests the company struggled to scale on its own in the global monitoring market. Before its founder's expectation that it would outgrow OpsGenie could come true, the product ended with an asset sale.
The story
Thundra's foundations were laid in 2017 inside OpsGenie, the Turkish-founded incident alerting company. Serkan Özal, a senior software engineer there, wrote a library to monitor Java functions running on AWS Lambda. OpsGenie used the tool in its own work for months without it even having an interface. At the end of 2017, OpsGenie CEO Berkay Mollamustafaoğlu asked for a prototype to see whether the library could become a product; the first version was ready in November 2017.
When the response was positive, the product was handed to a small team. When Atlassian bought OpsGenie for $295 million in 2018, Thundra was left out of the deal and was set up as a separate company in September 2018. According to Webrazzi, the Turkish tech news site, Mollamustafaoğlu believed Thundra would become even bigger than OpsGenie. After closing its first round, $4 million led by Battery Ventures, in January 2020, the company brought in enterprise software executive Ken Cheney as CEO, while Özal became CTO. The plan was to grow the sales team in the US and double the engineering team in Turkey. At the time the team numbered 13.
Thundra aimed to make the inner workings of serverless applications visible: it brought metrics, logs and traces together so that developers could find problems quickly. In April 2021 it added Thundra Sidekick, a feature focused on debugging.
The big leap that had been expected never came. In April 2023 a notice appeared on Thundra's website saying operations had ceased; users were told they could contact the support team until 12 May. On 18 April the US monitoring company Catchpoint announced that it had acquired Thundra's technology assets. The team moved to the new centre Catchpoint set up in Ankara, and Thundra's serverless monitoring capabilities were folded into Catchpoint's platform. The price was not disclosed.
Thundra's end was not a classic bankruptcy; the team and technology lived on under another roof. But as an independent product, Thundra passed into history in its fifth year as a company, without reaching the scale its founder had expected.
Lessons for founders
- An internal project born to solve your own problem is a good start, but once it becomes a separate company you have to prove the market all over again.
- Focusing on a single cloud ecosystem (here, AWS Lambda) gets you off the ground quickly, but it also ties the size of your market to that ecosystem.
- An asset sale can keep the team and technology alive, but it usually ends the brand and the product; bear that in mind when planning an exit.
Sources
- Thundra, acquired by a US-based software company, ceases operations (Webrazzi, 2023-04-13)
- Catchpoint Invests to Advance API, Cloud Functions, and Microservices Monitoring (Catchpoint, 2023-04-18)
- Thundra, which Berkay Mollamustafaoğlu says "will be even bigger than OpsGenie", raises $4 million in its first funding round (Webrazzi, 2020-01-22)
- Thundra announces $4M Series A to secure and troubleshoot serverless workloads (TechCrunch, 2020-01-22)
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