A young startup aims to help businesses lower their cloud costs by writing “more efficient” code – and has secured $6.8 million in new funding from notable backers including Alphabet’s GV, Spark Capital and Lightspeed.
Polar signalsas the company is called, started round seed in 2021 with $4 million from GV and Lightspeed, and now closes the circle at $10.8 million.
The problem that Polar Signals is trying to solve is this: Applications consume system resources such as Processor or memory, and the more resources they consume, the more a company’s cloud account costs — because the big platform providers charge based on consumption. One of the areas that affects resource consumption is the code itself — so the more structurally sound the code is, with fewer lines and redundant functions, the more efficiently it will run. And the more efficiently it works, the lower the cost of the cloud should theoretically be.
“Persistent Profile”
That’s where “continuous profiling” enters the fray, a concept that’s part of a broader software monitoring discipline known as “observability,” which is about measuring the internal state of a system to optimize performance. Continuous profiling reared its head in a 2010 Google research paper titled: Google-level profiling: A persistent profiling infrastructure for data centers.
At its core, continuous profiling is about monitoring resource consumption, including the number of lines in a given codebase, identifying bottlenecks that may be causing excessive resource consumption.
View Polar Signals infrastructure on sample CPUs. Image Credits: Polar signals
Polar Signals is the main developer behind Parks, an open source continuous profiling project that systematically monitors CPU and memory usage, creating searchable profiles of this data over time. Parca is the heartbeat of Polar Signals, on which the company builds commercial services including it was recently released hosted Polar Signals Cloud offering, which takes the spadework out of setup and management and introduces the usual features provided with most enterprise SaaS tools, such as single-sign on (SSO), team provisioning, and license management.
“Our mission is to make the world’s data centers 10 times more efficient than they are today,” Polar Signals Founder and CEO Frederic Branczyk he told TechCrunch.
Alongside today’s funding news, the company is also introducing AI-powered suggestions for improving the code — the user selects a section, taps “optimize with AI” and reviews the suggested tweaks. This is available through an early access program starting today.
Polar Signals: Code suggestions powered by AI. Image Credits: Polar signals
While cost reduction is one of the main benefits that Polar Signals promises, there are other benefits to the technology – such as incident response efforts around a DDoS attack, for example, as Polar Signals can provide insight into the impact of attack and identify which parts of a system are under stress.
“[The number one problem we solve] helps organizations understand and improve resource bottlenecks — however, what we’ve learned is that the strongest motivator tends to be different than we first thought,” Branczyk said. “Initially, we thought cost savings would be the strongest motivator, but we found out [companies are also using it for] incident response (eg ‘why did this delay or CPU spike happen’), and we can answer it down to the line number of the source code — it’s a much stronger motivator.”
The story so far
Founder and CEO Frederic Branczyk (fourth from right) flanked by Polar Signals colleagues. Image Credits: Polar signals
Polar Signals was founded in 2020 by Branczyk, a former Red Hat engineer and leader in the Prometheus and Kubernetes ecosystems — experience that positions Polar Signals well to target the enterprise cloud segment.
Since its official commercial launch in October, the company has amassed more than a dozen paying customers, including Vercel, Materialize, Canonical and Weaviate — and that’s something its new infusion of cash will help it double as it seeks further scale in the coming months and years.
“Our pipeline is so big we can’t even shut them down [new customers] quite quickly, so we also plan to significantly grow the team in this direction,” said Branczyk.
At the time of writing, Polar Signals claims 11 employees with experience at companies such as AWS, Meta, Red Hat and HashiCorp. And although the company is incorporated in the US, only two of its employees are based there — most of its workforce is employed at a subsidiary in Germany, where Branczyk himself is based, and through global HR firm Remote.com in Spain, UK, Poland and India.
In addition to lead investor Spark Capital, GV and Lightspeed, the company’s latest cash injection included contributions from a range of institutional and angel investors including Haystack, Lorimer and Guillermo Rauch – CEO of Polar Signals client Vercel.
