This Guy's Startup Solves One Of The Worst Problems For Tech Professionals

The worst part of being an IT professional is getting that call, text or email saying the computers have crashed.

Oddly, that really important task is still handled in low-tech ways. Someone manually calls in the troops, sending out emails or telling everyone about the problem over the phone.

PagerDuty aims to automate that. It offers a software-as-as-service to alert IT professionals when things break. It doesn't replace the IT management tools that watch for problems. It lets IT professionals choose how to contact them after those tools sound the alarm. It also automates the process of escalating the problem and finding the right person to fix things.

PagerDuty just nabbed a $10.7 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, Others invested, too, including famous angel and LiveOps chairman Maynard Webb, known as the guy that kept the IT systems at eBay from crashing.

Andreessen Horowitz's John O’Farrell, who will join the PagerDuty board, explained why he backed this startup:

"Today’s machines are very good at detecting and reporting incidents. It’s when those incidents get handed off to humans for remediation that things sometimes break down – because the humans are still using processes and technology that haven’t changed much in ten to fifteen years."

PagerDuty was founded in 2009 by three Amazon IT pros who all carried pagers at Amazon: Alex Solomon, Baskar Puvanathasan, Andrew Miklas. Since then, the company has accumulated an impressive customer list including Microsoft, National Instruments, Electronic Arts, Adobe, Rackspace, Etsy, Square and Github.

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