Gremlin, the world's first Failure-as-a-Service platform created by engineers formerly at Amazon and Netflix, today announced an $18 Million Series B led by Redpoint Ventures. Along with the new funding round, Gremlin has publicly launched Application Level Fault Injection (ALFI), enabling DevOps teams to safely inject failure at the application level for developing full-stack resiliency, including within serverless environments.

"Gremlin is the leader in helping businesses avoid disaster by proactively testing their systems," said Tomasz Tunguz, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures. "In a world where nearly every business is an online business, Gremlin makes companies more resilient and saves millions of dollars in unnecessary disasters and outages. We're thrilled to join them on this journey."

"The concept of purposefully injecting harm into systems is still new for many companies, but chaos engineering has been practiced at places like Amazon and Netflix for over a decade," said Kolton Andrus, CEO and Co-Founder of Gremlin. "We like to use the analogy of a flu shot, injecting small amounts of harm to build an immunity, in order to proactively avoid disasters. Now with ALFI, users will be able to bring this practice to serverless environments, and have much greater control within their applications."

According to Cloudability's State of the Cloud 2018 report, serverless adoption has been growing steadily and will only continue to increase. With the general availability of ALFI, companies can be more targeted about testing their products and services, including the ability to run chaos experiments on serverless environments that do not have a specified host or container. Being able to verify that serverless environments can handle failures will increase confidence and willingness of companies to run real production workloads. "These practices seek to proactively find failures before they can unexpectedly occur and cause large-scale cascade failures in today's complex IT systems," said Mark Thomas Jaggers, Research Director of Infrastructure Strategies for IT Leadership at Gartner.*

"With ALFI one of the first problems we wanted to address was improving the reliability and understanding of serverless providers like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions," said Matthew Fornaciari, CTO and Co-Founder of Gremlin. "It's a tough problem to solve because the host is abstracted and it's a very new technology -- but now we can run attacks at the application level, and with a level of precision that isn't possible at the infrastructure level. We are giving them a scalpel to very specifically target particular communications between different systems and services."

*Gartner, Cool Vendors in DevOps, First Wave, 18 April 2018

About Gremlin
Gremlin is a "Failure-as-a-Service" platform built to make the internet more reliable. It turns failure into resilience by offering engineers a fully hosted solution to safely experiment on complex systems, in order to identify weaknesses before they impact customers and cause revenue loss. Founded by CEO Kolton Andrus and CTO Matthew Fornaciari in 2016, the company has raised $23.75 Million in funding from Redpoint Ventures, Index Ventures, and Amplify Partners. Existing customers include Expedia, Qualtrics, Twilio, Under Armour, and Walmart.

About Redpoint Ventures
Redpoint Ventures has partnered with visionary founders to create new markets and redefine existing ones since 1999. The firm invests in startups across the seed, early and growth phases. Redpoint has backed over 465 companies with 140 IPOs and M+As, including 2U, HomeAway, Heroku, Netflix, PureStorage, Twilio and Zendesk, and incubated market disruptors like Android. In total, the firm manages $4 billion across multiple funds. Redpoint is based in Menlo Park and has offices in San Francisco, Beijing and Shanghai.

Supporting Quotes
"Today we live in an online world, where we expect products and services to always be available. Failing to live up to that expectation can not only result in lost revenue, it can also damage customer trust and have negative long-term effects on a company's brand. Chaos engineering is a breakthrough way to anticipate failure and take a proactive approach to preparing for, and ideally completely avoiding, disastrous outages." -- Mike Volpi, General Partner at Index Ventures.

"Practicing chaos engineering is a great way to build up the resiliency of your applications. By shifting more of the operations burden upfront, you proactively identify weaknesses instead of reactively solve problems that have already impacted customers." -- Jay Gordon, Senior Cloud Ops Advocate at Microsoft

"AWS Lambda protects you against some infrastructure failures, but you still need to defend against weakness in your own code. Application-level fault injection is a great way to uncover these weaknesses." -- Yan Cui, Principal Engineer at DAZN

More Information
Gremlin unveiled ALFI at Chaos Conf, a full-day conference in San Francisco around Chaos Engineering open to the general public. For more detailed information about ALFI, read the blog post here. For resources to help you get started with Chaos Engineering, visit the Gremlin Community and sign up for a demo.