Introducing: Sensu, Inc.

January 30, 2017 (Portland, Oregon) — It is with incredible pleasure and gratitude that we are able to announce today that Heavy Water Operations has formally changed its name to Sensu, Inc. and has secured $2.5M in Series Seed financing led by the Boulder, Colorado-based venture capital firm Foundry Group. Ryan McIntyre (Managing Director at Foundry Group) will join Sean Porter (original author of Sensu, Co-Founder and CTO of Sensu Inc), and Caleb Hailey (Co-Founder and CEO), on Sensu’s inaugural Board of Directors. Matt Shobe (CPO at Mighty AI and former Co-Founder of FeedBurner) is also participating in the round as an angel investor, and will act as an advisor to our young venture.

As recently recounted on the Sensu blog, the Sensu journey began over five years ago as an internal project at Sonian. It was intended to replace an aging Nagios installation that couldn’t keep up with the rapidly evolving demands of a dynamic public-cloud infrastructure. Since inheriting custodianship of the Sensu open source software project in 2013 (via recruiting Sean Porter), and subsequently launching Sensu Enterprise in April 2015, we have had the opportunity to observe first-hand the increasingly mission-critical role of monitoring in countless organizations.

At Sensu we believe that as more companies shift to using software to deliver value to their customers, the availability of that software becomes a matter of critical importance. Even brief periods of critical application downtime represent significant losses in revenue. This trend is driving more and more organizations to make monitoring a core competency rather than an IT/operational concern.

Although the monitoring landscape has become an increasingly crowded space, we see a bright future for Sensu. This outlook is thanks in part to Sensu’s unique architecture and approach to solving monitoring problems, but also because we believe what a wise man once said:

“Mission-critical infrastructure systems must be open-source to achieve true scale.”
— Adam Jacob (Co-Founder, CTO @ Chef)

Sensu Inc will use the infusion of capital to expand the company and further enhance its flagship software offerings: the open source Sensu Core project, and Sensu Enterprise product.

About Foundry Group

Foundry Group is a venture capital firm focused on making early-stage technology investments, participating in select growth rounds, and identifying and supporting the next generation of venture fund managers.

Foundry’s passion is working alongside entrepreneurs to give birth to new technologies and to build those technologies into industry-leading companies. We also seek to leverage our experience and relationships as fund managers to help new and existing venture firms create industry leading investment businesses. We’re centrally located in Boulder, CO, but we invest in companies and funds across North America.

Learn more about Foundry Group, here: http://foundrygroup.com/about/

About Sensu

Sensu enables high-velocity organizations to maintain operational visibility, while supporting software and infrastructure-as-code development best practices, and solving the unique challenges of monitoring in dynamic operating environments (e.g. public/private/hybrid cloud computing environments, container-based environments, and more). As a framework and software platform, Sensu will increase its commitment to open-source, while continuing to innovate as a fundamentally different approach to full-stack monitoring.

Sunsetting Heavy Water Operations

Originally founded in 2012 as a small, bootstrapped infrastructure automation consulting firm, Heavy Water Operations will no longer continue to operate as a professional services organization. Many of Heavy Water’s activities as maintainers of various open source software components and participants in various automation and DevOps communities will be continued via independent contributions and trusted partners. Heavy Water’s various web properties will be updated in the coming weeks with additional information.

Special Thanks

We want to take this opportunity to thank the many friends and advisors who have helped us along our journey over the past few years. We’d also like to thank the Sensu community for your patience while we have grown Sensu organically over the years — we’re looking forward to accelerating that growth very soon. And finally, although we couldn’t possibly name every person who took the time to help us on the path to this financing last year, we do want to give a special thanks to Brad Feld, Jason Mendelson, Adam Jacob, Luke Kanies, Mark Imbriaco, Mat Ellis, Steven Davis, Nick Stielau, and Pete Cheslock for your published words, thoughtful input, advice, constructive criticism, support, hugs, counsel, email introductions, excellent taste in scotch whiskey, and votes of confidence.

The next round (of beers) is on us. :-)

#monitoringlove

The Sensu Party The Sensu Party @ Monitorama 2016, attended by many members of Team Sensu, the Sensu open source community, and current & future customers.