Highlight, a San Francisco-based startup dedicated to enhancing web application observability for enterprises, has proudly unveiled its flagship product to the public. This innovative offering is an open-source monitoring platform that consolidates a comprehensive view of an application’s entire stack and the associated issues into a single, easily accessible location. In tandem with this release, Highlight has successfully secured $8 million in seed funding, with Afore Capital and Craft Ventures leading the investment, joined by Y Combinator (W23), Neo, Day One Ventures, Worklife Ventures, Fuel Capital, and notable angel investors, including Siqi Chen, Scott Banister, Sahil Bloom, Jordan Segall, and Calvin French.
Highlight intends to allocate this capital towards further enriching the product’s functionality and compatibility, while fostering community engagement initiatives.
Jay Khatri, co-founder, and CEO of the company, emphasized the importance of their open-source community, which empowers engineers to deliver superior user experiences with unparalleled efficiency by uniting full-stack development with full-stack observability.
The Necessity of Front-End and Back-End Monitoring In response to the growing demand for streamlined development efforts driven by digitally savvy consumers, businesses have realized the importance of not only creating high-quality applications but also maintaining and improving them over time. This is where monitoring becomes crucial.
In recent years, several monitoring platforms like New Relic and Datadog have emerged, but many are still limited in scope, focusing on either user-side issues or back-end errors. This approach forces engineers to manually piece together front-end and back-end data to identify root causes, thereby slowing down the resolution process.
Having witnessed these challenges during their professional careers, Jay Khatri, formerly at Google DeepMind, and Vadim Korolik, a technical staff member at Pure Storage, decided to address this problem by founding Highlight in 2022.
Highlight offers enterprises a unified platform that provides a comprehensive view of the entire application stack, encompassing both front-end and back-end issues, if any. This is achieved by combining three core capabilities: full-stack error monitoring, front-end session replay, and logging.
Error monitoring delivers real-time alerts about glitches before they escalate, session replay provides developers with insights into why bugs are occurring in their web applications, and logging enables error search and tracking throughout the stack. When these three elements converge, developers can swiftly identify and resolve issues without the laborious process of manually collating data.
Khatri emphasized that Highlight is built on the OpenTelemetry (OTel) observability framework, ensuring smooth integration for enterprises. They can choose to use Highlight’s off-the-shelf SDKs or send OTel data directly to Highlight, making the integration process hassle-free.
Before the public launch, Highlight open-sourced the platform’s codebase, attracting substantial interest with over 5,000 GitHub stars and more than 5,000 developers contributing to the project. Notably, early customers of Highlight included large enterprises and high-growth startups like Beeper, Aurora, Focal, WeRecover, FlowClub, Influexer, Puzzle, Cabal, HotPlate, CommandBar, Potion, and Levro.
Future Endeavors Following this latest funding round, the Highlight team has ambitious plans for the platform. They aim to expand their support for more environments and languages across their SDKs. Additionally, they are working on several upcoming products, including a tracing and metrics product. Community engagement remains a focal point, as they continue to nurture their open-source roots to ensure their vibrant and robust presence in the industry.
According to market projections from MarketsAndMarkets, the observability tools and platforms market is expected to experience substantial growth, with its value increasing from $2.4 billion in 2023 to $4.1 billion by 2028, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 12%.