Cybersecurity practitioners take a community-focused approach to solving problems. Security researchers share the vulnerabilities they find with the broader cybersecurity community; This allows companies to close security vulnerabilities before they result in disaster.

front section He wants to bring the same approach to software.

The startup creates a database of software failure patterns or misconfigurations in Linux workloads. The database is updated by a growing community of engineers and developers who exchange information about reliability. The Prequel's software then resides within a company's existing software stack and taps into that database, constantly checking for errors and malfunctions.

The company's co-founders, Tony Meehan and Lyndon Brown (left to right in the image above), both have security backgrounds; Both worked at the National Security Agency and cyber operations platform company Endgame.

Brown told TechCrunch that when software fails, engineers have to fill out endless data logs to try to detect the problem before they can begin mitigating it. For some software problems, only a few people in the company know enough about the programs to help.

“We had a time in my past life where I had to call a former employee and say, 'Hey, I know you left the company, but no one really understands how this particular service works.' Can you help us?'” Brown said. “Our customers have told us stories about driving to people's homes in the middle of the night and knocking on the wrong door to get help.”

Brown and Meehan wondered why software bugs didn't have the same system for sharing information about vulnerabilities. When they realized that no one was making progress in this area, they decided to try it.

"If people had seen this problem before, you could actually solve your problem," Meehan said. “That was like an anchor for us. “How do we build a product like what we did in security 15 years ago that unlocks this community of people who have seen known failures and open source software?”

The prequel was released in 2023 and has been working secretly so far. The company says its technology is already used at a handful of Fortune 500 companies and has built a community network of up to about 500 people.

Now the company is coming out of stealth and announcing a $3.3 million seed round led by Work-Bench, with participation from Runtime Ventures, Operator Partners, and a number of angel investors who understand this problem, including Elastic CTO Shay Banon and Jon. Oberheide is the former founder and CTO of Duo Security, among others. The capital will be allocated to product development and expansion of the detection library.

Prequel's biggest competition is data observability and monitoring products, which also monitor software for potential failures and errors, Brown said. Companies in this space include Datadog and Splunk.

But Brown argues that observability platforms are only as good as the engineering talent you put in front of them. Moreover, while any of these platforms only help companies deal with catastrophic failures after they happen, Prequel's approach allows people to start solving problems earlier, before they reach the level where only a select few know how to solve them. He added that unlike some of these companies, they also do not charge their customers for data transfers because all their data remains with the customers, they only charge a subscription for the service itself.

Meehan said the team welcomed the competition because it felt like having more players focusing on that area could be a tide that lifts all boats.

“In modern applications, failure is constant and teams can only really get to catastrophic failures or failures that have a similar impact on the customer,” Brown said. “What we're really excited about is enabling teams to better tackle the many issues at hand and make prioritization decisions.”