OpsRamp raises $37.5 million to apply AI to DevOps processes

Ever heard of AI for IT management (AIOps)? It’s a burgeoning ecosystem of platforms and products that enhance IT operations by leveraging AI to analyze data collected from various tools and devices. OpsRamp is one of the startups leading the charge in what Research and Markets anticipates will be a $14.3 billion segment by 2025. Raju Chekuri and Varma Kunaparaju cofounded the San Jose, California-based company in 2014 with the goal of developing “service-centric” offerings for enterprises, and their investors evidently believe they’ve achieved that.

Today OpsRamp announced the closing of a $37.5 million investment led by Stanley Expansion Capital, with new investor Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The round includes a second investment from Sapphire Ventures, bringing OpsRamp’s total raised to nearly $50 million. CEO Kunaparaju said the capital will be used to grow and scale its family of cloud-based discovery, monitoring, and automation products.

OpsRamp’s offering — which uses a combination of agents and gateways running on virtual appliances to monitor services, network, and storage infrastructure — aims to understand relationships between services and IT assets while managing incidents across business divisions. With unified service discovery, it’s able to deliver visibility and dependency mapping for virtually any hybrid IT infrastructure and fold monitoring and event management into one place. And OpsRamp can proactively troubleshoot alerts with consolidated infrastructure configurations and patch management processes.

It also automates work according to schedule, audit, and compliance policies and provides device-level control and remediation for a range of hardware products. Plus, OpsRamp offers prebuilt integrations that collate lines of business, point tools, infrastructure, and workflows, and its API framework and integrations allow it to ingest alerts and tickets from apps, infrastructure monitoring, and service desk tools.

Above: The OpsRamp dashboard. | Image Credit: OpsRamp

According to Kunaparaju, OpsRamp follows strict practices for the customer data it manages and stores. It only sweeps up and retains data that’s needed for IT operations functions on devices and apps it manages (like performance statistics and device metadata), and it encrypts sensitive data while restricting access to authorized users only. Additionally, it records all actions carried out by administrators on a device, and it maintains logs of user activity and remote access across hybrid IT environments.

Customers can create multiple roles and assign roles to users based on their responsibilities within OpsRamp. Furthermore, they can restrict the activities a user performs in OpsRamp based on roles, user groups, device groups, and permission sets.

There’s plenty of competition in the AIOps segment, to be sure. ServiceNow recently acquired Loom Systems, which uses machine learning to detect anomalous behavior or patterns in software logs. San Francisco-based Coralogix raised $10 million in November 2019 for similar tech. And incumbents like Splunk and AppDynamics are increasingly incorporating AI and machine learning into their developer operations products.

But Sapphire Ventures CEO and managing director Nino Marakovic noted that OpsRamp saw a 300% uptick in net new annual recurring revenue growth and that it now has over 1,400 customers, including Epsilon, Dolby, Caxton, Bio-Rad, GreenPages, NEC, and NetApp. “We’re delighted to continue our commitment to OpsRamp and their mission of transforming IT teams into the drivers of digital transformation for modern enterprises,” he said. “The company’s growth and trajectory is impressive, and I believe that signals they’re addressing the right need at the right time.”