Prequel, a community-driven problem detection and management platform for cloud applications, announced it emerged from stealth and raised $3.3 million in seed funding. The round was led by Work-Bench, with participation from Runtime Ventures and Operator Partners.
The founders of leading category-defining infrastructure companies joined the round: Shay Banon (CTO of Elastic), Jon Oberheide (CTO of Duo Security), Monica Sarbu (CEO of Xata), and Andrew Morris (CTO of GreyNoise).
Engineering teams have been pressured to accelerate development and optimize resources while delivering reliable services. However, problems introduced by internal developers, issues in open-source dependencies, and service misconfigurations frequently block releases, leading to incidents and an increase in cloud spending by 30%. Thousands of avoidable problems go unresolved until end customers are impacted, as accurate identification and mitigation require specialized engineering knowledge and time-consuming manual analysis. As AI-driven development increases software output, engineers have more problems to manage and less expertise in the code.
Prequel was launched by Lyndon Brown and Tony Meehan, former engineering leaders from Elastic, Mandiant (acquired by Google), and the National Security Agency (NSA). Its goal is to close this gap by bringing the practices of detection engineering and global intelligence to reliability.
Prequel is the first problem detection and management platform for cloud applications. And conventional monitoring approaches depend on observability solutions that trigger noisy threshold or anomaly-based alerts in response to general symptoms like high latency or errors. Prequel flips this model by using deterministic detections to precisely flag underlying failure conditions from the bottom up in production, staging, or development environments. Each identified problem is mapped to the current impact with clear mitigation steps.
Prequel's backbone is a patent-pending AI-based in-cluster detection engine that is purpose-built for reliability. It can efficiently run thousands of real-time detections per second against a continuous stream of low-level telemetry without raw data leaving a customer's cluster. This starkly contrasts with observability products that rely on collecting, moving, and storing gigabytes of costly telemetry, 90% of which is never used.
Already established at Fortune 500 companies, Prequel is a first line of defense, improving the reliability of high-availability fintech, infrastructure, and SaaS applications. The platform proactively takes on tedious problem detection and analysis work, enabling site reliability engineers (SREs) and software engineers to shift valuable time from firefighting to feature development and future-proofing. Early Prequel users have reported a 37% increase in engineering velocity.
Prequel is engineered to provide value without requiring developers to modify their code. Customers install Prequel by running a single command. Once installed, the platform automatically discovers and instruments workloads, running a dynamic set of complex problem detectors in real-time against traces, metrics, logs, Kubernetes events, CPU and memory profiles, and more.
Prequel is powered by reliability intelligence (RI), a continuous feed of global failure and problem detection knowledge. And to achieve this, Prequel pioneered several industry firsts. The Prequel Reliability Research Team (PRRT) is, at the core, bolstered by former NSA bug hunters, who proactively analyze hundreds of open-source projects to identify failure patterns. These findings and common developer-introduced problems are encoded as machine-readable Common Reliability Enumerations (CREs) with the support of Prequel's proprietary retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models.
Earlier this year, Prequel launched the first open problem detection community, detect.sh, where reliability engineers exchange and contribute detection techniques. Prequel customers can augment the growing list of out-of-the-box and community detections with their own custom detection rules, optionally sharing these failure fingerprints with the world.
KEY QUOTES:
"Prequel independently flagged issues that were the underlying cause of complex bug reports. We're able to catch problems earlier and save time on troubleshooting."
- Andy Martin, Director, Infrastructure, Schrödinger, a leading provider of software solutions for the life and material sciences industries
"Prequel's technology uniquely enables reliability outcomes, helping companies confidently accelerate releases while avoiding outages and optimizing CPU and GPU utilization. In the same way enterprises lean on community-driven intelligence to root out security vulnerabilities and malware, they can now rely on Prequel to deliver the equivalent outcomes for reliability."
- Kelley Mak, General Partner at Work-Bench
"Engineering teams are stuck in an endless cycle of reactive firefighting. We lived this firsthand and leaned on our cyber security experience to define a better way. We are thrilled to have the trust of customers and the support of leading investors and proven founders."
- Lyndon Brown, co-founder and CEO of Prequel