When the three founders of lighthouses.ai were working at Salesforce, they helped develop the company's artificial intelligence engine, known as Einstein. Although the goal of Einstein was to help companies become more data-driven, the engineering team that created it experienced the same pain tracking engineering and development operations data as any other company.
The CEO and co-founder of lighthouses.ai, Vitaly Gordon, said that despite Salesforce's vast resources, they still suffered from data shortages and a lack of proper tools to collect it. “We were scaling that operation within Salesforce and working with close to 10.000 customers, but we realized we weren't really practicing what we preach as a technical organization,” Gordon said.
That his engineering team lacked the kinds of tools he was building for sales and marketing teams to put data to work was a real eye-opener. They started working on the problem as a side project before realizing that it was a big problem for everyone globally.
The three founders, Gordon, plus Salesforce Einstein alumni Matthew Tovbin and Shubha Nabar, left the company in 2019 to build lighthouses.ai To solve the problem. They wanted to make it easier for engineering management to look at the data and figure out things like how long it will take from the time a developer finishes coding to when updated code hits production in front of customers.
They began creating a product that would connect to engineering systems like Jira, Jenkins, and GitHub, including an intelligence layer to make logical connections between data that they could deliver to customers in a dashboard. So, for example, the system can see that the engineer logged into GitHub is the same engineer logged into Jira, and it can track the history and movement of an engineering project across systems.
Faros AI Engineering Operations Dashboard.
They have built over 50 connectors for common tools, but decided to open up connector technology so that engineering teams could connect to any system, regardless of whether lighthouses.ai it supported it natively or not. Eventually, they also decided to develop an open source version of the entire product called Faros CE (short for Community Edition), which they are making publicly available.
The enterprise version is a fully hosted SaaS product with the kinds of extras you'd expect from enterprise customers, like security controls, role-based access, connections to enterprise authentication systems like Okta, and more. Clients currently using it include Box, Coursera, and GoFundMe.
The startup has 20 employees and hopes to double that number by the end of this year. It already has a diverse executive team, with a 50% male-to-female ratio, as it seeks to build a diverse team more broadly. Gordon said they were able to leverage their Salesforce network Einstein, which was a diverse team, and its time to help make it happen.
The company also announced a $16 million seed round today. It received the first $3,75 million in October 2019 shortly after launch. After hitting certain milestones with investors, they received another 3 million or so and recently got the rest. Funding was provided by SignalFire, Salesforce Ventures and Global Founders Capital with the participation of various industry individuals.
It is worth noting that other startups like Pinpoint are also working on the same problem.
