Helios raises $5M for platform to increase cloud-native development velocity

The platform increases developer velocity when building distributed applications, supporting devs from their local environments to production

TEL AVIV, Israel, July 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Helios, the platform for developers building cloud-native applications, announced today $5M funding to make it easier to understand, troubleshoot, and test distributed systems during development. The seed round was co-led by Entrée Capital and Amiti VC. A number of angel investors also joined, including Benny Schnaider, Guy Podjarny (co-founder of Snyk), Adi Sharabani and Yair Amit (co-founders of Skycure) and Guy Fighel (GM at New Relic). The company also announced the launch of a new free tier for their platform. 

Modern cloud apps consist of dozens or hundreds of microservices, cloud components and third-party APIs; a single initial request can hit hundreds of different services as it branches out throughout the application. That makes it hard for developers to fully understand their code and how it interacts with the system as a whole, in their local development environment and through testing to production. These friction points slow down the whole development process, lead to buggy code, and end up frustrating the developers.

"As applications and companies grow, development slows down because it's harder and harder to understand how one small change might affect the system," said Ran Nozik, co-founder and CTO of Helios. "A small change or bug in a microservice or API can ripple out through a distributed app; perhaps twenty microservices later the change causes an error, or data is silently lost. Devs spend more and more time troubleshooting and less time on what they want to be doing — creating new features."

As companies and apps grow and become more complex, codebases and developer teams expand and these challenges become more acute. To observe distributed applications in production, DevOps practitioners use advanced monitoring platforms. Developers, though, have been left behind, missing out on new tooling for a world of cloud-native apps. 

Helios is the first developer platform built specifically for cloud-native application development. Helios breaks down the silos inherent in microservice architectures, giving developers a full understanding of how their code interacts with the distributed app as a whole so they can build, troubleshoot and test more easily, significantly increasing development velocity. Using the power of OpenTelemetry to provide distributed tracing combined with other data sources, Helios enables Dev teams to easily track how a request flows through their application and gives them the context they need to quickly resolve issues. The platform can automatically 'replay' inputs at any point in the application flow, allowing developers to reproduce issues with ease. With actionable insights and collaboration tools, Helios makes developers happier, allowing them to communicate and cooperate as they modify different parts of the app.

Helios was founded by Eli Cohen and Ran Nozik, old friends who've worked closely together over the last two decades, gaining engineering and product experience at successful tech companies. The company today has 15 employees and is working with dozens of early customers.

"Growing tech companies often grapple with scaling their cloud-native architecture," says Eran Bielski, General Partner at Entrée Capital. "Companies want to focus on building a successful business, but often the day-to-day work of developers is full of friction that slows down progress. Helios' focus on both developer velocity and productivity is exactly what the market needs, and I have little doubt that every software development company in the world will soon be using such a tool."

Eli Cohen, co-founder and CEO of Helios, said "We built Helios to give developers the cloud-native dev platform we wish we'd had ourselves. Helios gives the right data with the right context at the right time, throughout the entire development lifecycle, streamlining activities from design and collaboration to troubleshooting and testing. The best feedback we get from our customers is that Helios makes their developers happier and helps them build better together."

ABOUT HELIOS:

Helios is a developer platform that helps drive dev velocity and productivity when building cloud-native applications. It accelerates R&D work, streamlining activities from design and collaboration to troubleshooting and testing, across all environments.

SOURCE Helios