Chaos Engineering Leader Gremlin Crosses $10M Of ARR, Hires Industry Veteran Josh Leslie As CEO

SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 9, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Gremlin, the Chaos Engineering company founded by former Netflix and Amazon engineers, announced today that Josh Leslie has joined the company as chief executive officer. Kolton Andrus, who co-founded the company in 2016, will assume the role of chief technology officer and will drive the company's product and engineering organizations.

The announcement comes as Gremlin has recently achieved rapid adoption among enterprise cloud engineering teams. In 2021, the company exceeded $10 million of annualized recurring revenue, cementing its leadership position in Chaos Engineering. Gremlin drove the creation and adoption of Chaos Engineering, a technology approach inspired by work done at Netflix and Amazon. Gremlin now has over 100 enterprise customers, including technology leaders GrubHub, JP Morgan Chase, Target and Twilio. The company is anticipating 100% growth in 2022.

Andrus, an early pioneer in Chaos Engineering at Amazon and Netflix, has successfully led Gremlin from its founding up to today. The company has achieved widespread adoption, making Chaos Engineering a standard pillar of modern software development. In his role as CTO, Kolton will drive Gremlin's vision and work closely with Gremlin's community of loyal users to build the next generation of products and services.

"As our world has continued to rely more and more on our digital infrastructure, the importance of these services being always 'on' and available has likewise increased," said Andrus. "Ensuring that our financial, legal, transportation, communication and other online systems are robust and able to withstand software failures translates into winning customer trust, faster speed of innovation and an overall higher quality product. I'm excited to continue scaling Gremlin to be able to meet the needs of our current and future customers."

Leslie moves into the CEO role after serving as an advisor and on the board of Gremlin since August of 2020. He joins Gremlin after a successful stint as CEO of Cumulus Networks, a pioneer in software defined networking, that was purchased by Nvidia in June of 2020. He brings extensive experience scaling organizations and building winning teams. Leslie also spent six years in leadership roles at VMware, helping to scale its go-to-market organization from $100M to over $1B in annual sales.

"I'm delighted and honored by the opportunity to be part of Gremlin and to partner with Kolton to build an enduring company," said Leslie. "Infrastructure has never been more important, and also more complex and more brittle. Gremlin, leveraging our technical leadership in Chaos Engineering, allows cloud engineering teams to build with unprecedented speed and confidence. As the pace of technology innovation increases, we see Gremlin as the next critical piece of modern infrastructure software giving customers the confidence they need to move their business forward."

Gartner® Research has published several recent reports documenting the immense market opportunity in Chaos Engineering:

- In "Predicts 2021: Value Streams Will Define the Future of DevOps," Gartner Research anticipates that "by 2025, 60% of I&O leaders will implement chaos engineering to add resilience and velocity improvements to value stream flow, increasing system availability by 10%". In the same report, the firm predicts that "through 2025, 20% of enterprises will go beyond SRE by adding IT resilience roles to improve resiliency posture between product teams and traditional DR".¹

- In "The I&O Leader's Guide to Chaos Engineering," Gartner Research anticipates that "40% of organizations will implement chaos engineering practices as part of DevOps initiatives by 2023, reducing unplanned downtime by 20%".²

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

About Gremlin
Gremlin is the world's first hosted Chaos Engineering service with a mission to help build a more reliable internet. It turns failure into resilience by offering engineers tooling to safely experiment on complex systems, in order to identify weaknesses before they impact customers and cause revenue loss. Gremlin has raised $52 million and investors include Amplify Partners, Index Ventures and Redpoint Ventures.

1. Gartner, "Predicts 2021: Value Streams Will Define the Future of DevOps", Daniel Betts, Chris Saunderson, Ron Blair et al, October 5, 2020.
2. Smarter With Gartner, "The I&O Leader's Guide to Chaos Engineering" October 28, 2021.[ https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/the-io-leaders-guide-to-chaos-engineering]

SOURCE Gremlin