ThousandEyes, a San Francisco based startup with offices in Austin and London, was founded in 2010 with a game-changing approach to network monitoring: creating software that could provide insight into not only their customers’ internal networks, but the entire Internet.
Using specially crafted network packets, ThousandEyes’ Enterprise Agents map traffic paths and measure how links and interfaces perform along those paths to determine network health and application performance at user-defined intervals. Enterprise agents also measure availability and response time for internally and externally hosted applications that flow over the network, such as HTTP, HTML pages, and VoIP. This allows customers to troubleshoot network edge issues, understand and optimize WAN performance, and monitor internally hosted applications that are mission-critical.
Because ThousandEyes’ unique approach requires them to monitor Internet cloud providers like AWS, which many startups rely on for cost-effective server space, they faced a considerable hurdle to getting the company off the ground: building their own data center from scratch. In order to do so, they procured a grant from the National Science Foundation and used it to pay for discarded servers to build their data center. To find customers, they scanned Twitter to find companies alerting their customers to outages and would cold call them with information on what happened to their networks. This allowed ThousandEyes to grow into a thriving company with Fortune 20 customers without ever having to raise money. As a result, their official launch was met with considerable interest from VCs and a $5.5 million Series A from Sequoia without ever having to formally pitch their product.
Since their inception in 2009, ThousandEyes has amassed $60.5 million in venture capital and was valued last year at $273 million, with over 40 Fortune 500 customers including MasterCard, Comcast, and HP that have allowed them to double their annual revenue year over year.
Company Background
- Founded: Jan 2, 2010
- Raised: $60.5M
- # of Employees: ~200
- Founders: Mohit Lad (CEO) and Ricardo Oliveira (CTO)
- Backers: Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures, Tenaya Capital and GV (formerly Google Ventures)
- Product: Network Analytics
- Customers: GitHub, Box, Shutterstock, Okta, Comcast, Proofpoint, Slack, HP, Crowdstrike, Craigslist, Conde Nast
Platform Features
- Network Monitoring: Provides monitoring for network and app performance across WAN, local networks, data centers, Internet and the cloud. Path and route visualizations highlight problem areas across any network port or application and allow customers to efficiently troubleshoot outages. Customers can also use Network Monitoring to gain visibility of remotely hosted apps and remote workers.
- Enterprise WAN: Provides visibility for WAN and LAN delivery of internal and SaaS services, allowing customers to solve issues like Wi-Fi quality, routing, and QoS across the entire enterprise network. Customers can gather data from any network, including employee and end user perspectives, as well as gain visibility into forward and reverse paths between a customer’s edge and various points around the world. Enterprise WAN software can be deployed as virtual appliances, containers, or on Cisco routers.
- Application Delivery: Provides monitoring of all network segments from first to last hop to pinpoint the issues causing poor app performance. With visibility into various factors such as ISPs, CDNs, and DNS providers, customers can determine how vendors and other third-party providers that may be affecting app performance.
