Irish startup Kerno raises €1.69 million to provide problem-solving technology for engineering and operation teams

Kerno, a problem-solving technology for engineering and operations teams that swiftly monitors and troubleshoots applications, all within a matter of minutes has secured €1.69 million in a seed round led by Elkstone Ventures.

Kerno was founded in 2022 by Sean Madigan, Karim Traiaia, Anibel Ambertin, Maxi Delo and Vlad Romanov, who all have extensive engineering backgrounds and have faced the very issues Kerno now solves.

Despite substantial investments in observability tools, cloud-native developers can spend an astonishing 70% of their time finding and fixing production issues. Kerno reimagines the entire troubleshooting experience by empowering every engineer with the ability to swiftly monitor and troubleshoot applications, quickly and autonomously. By empowering developers, it will mobilise 90% of the engineering workforce who have the application domain knowledge – reducing the strain on already overstretched operation teams.

The round is led by Elkstone Ventures, with participation from MMC Ventures in London and angel investors including Sean Mullaney (CTO at Algolia), and Stephan Schulze (CTO and MD at Project A Ventures). This financial backing will enable Kerno to double down on its engineering capabilities to further the efficiency and effectiveness of its problem-solving technology. Kerno plans to use the funding to scale across to 100k cloud-native developers and increase their employee headcount from 11 to 20 over the next 2 years.

The product, which is currently still in testing with early adopters, can be installed with no code instrumentation or sidecar required, which typically bring hefty installation times and performance penalties. Kerno provides simplified, highly curated information on cloud application issues, meaning engineering and ops teams can quickly figure out when a problem occurred, how it impacts the business, what caused it, and who can fix it.

Because Kerno can be deployed in the customer’s cloud environment (at edge), it means customers can avail of their current cloud infrastructure and reduce expensive data processing and data egress costs typically associated with current monitoring solutions.

Sean Madigan, co-founder and CEO of Kerno said: “Current solutions are data intensive, need continuous upkeep and ultimately have poor developer experiences. In a world where cloud applications are getting more expensive to run and troubleshoot due to complexity, accelerated release cycles, and customer expectations, developers need to be empowered to contribute.

“Kerno is on a mission to deliver a true cloud-native experience, characterised by speed and cost-effectiveness, to the world of developer observability. With Kerno, development teams can reclaim their time and confidently drive innovation without compromising on speed and quality. This funding will help us accelerate time to market through increased engineering capacity and kickstart scaling to millions of developers globally.”

An entrepreneur with an engineering background, Sean is the former EMEA Director of Secure Code Warrior (raised over $100M from the likes of Paladin Capital Group and Goldman Sachs), where he hired and scaled the team that grew annual recurring revenue from $0 to $15M.

Niall McEvoy, Venture Partner at Elkstone Ventures, said “We were impressed by Kerno’s innovative approach to simplifying troubleshooting in cloud applications. Their commitment to providing a streamlined, out-of-the-box experience for engineering and ops teams sets them apart in a landscape where complexity and inefficiencies prevail. We believe in Kerno’s potential to reshape how critical issues are addressed.”

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