In 2015, a Fortune 500 company knocked on BigPanda's door with a check and an offer Assaf Resnick's wife said he should not refuse. The company had just launched a new product after pivoting out of ad-tech. The market had not yet noticed. His wife, watching him grind through sleepless nights with three young children at home, made the case plainly: take the money and be done with it.
He said no. And then spent the next two years in what he calls the "crickets" period - releasing a product into near-total silence, fielding a hundred "no's" for every interested prospect, and quietly wondering whether he'd made the worst decision of his career.
That's not a startup origin story with a clean arc. It's something messier: a former venture capitalist who had watched dozens of founders build companies, who'd told himself he understood the psychology of it, now experiencing from the inside what he'd only observed from across a boardroom table. "I don't think these people are necessarily smarter than I am," he said of the entrepreneurs he'd backed at Sequoia. "Just a hell of a lot more courageous."
Then, in the first quarter of 2017, a major semiconductor manufacturer standardized its IT operations on BigPanda. More enterprises followed. The silence broke. And a category - AIOps - that Resnick had been building toward before most people had a name for it, finally found its moment.
Today, BigPanda is the platform keeping the lights on for some of the world's largest enterprises - automating the detection, correlation, and resolution of IT incidents across complex cloud environments. The company has raised over $330 million, employs more than 350 people, and in May 2025 launched its Agentic IT Operations platform targeting a $200 billion market. It acquired SRE company Velocity in November 2025 to accelerate autonomous incident response capabilities.
Resnick runs the company from Mountain View, California, not far from where he grew up after arriving from Israel at age 4. His father worked in technology and told him to study engineering. He studied business and history instead - a useful act of defiance for someone who would later build a company about understanding systems, not just running them.
The path between UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and BigPanda's founder chair wasn't a straight line. There was a stint in optical networking during the dot-com bubble, where he watched a boom and bust happen up close. There was a period of traveling by motorcycle through South America and India - a gap that would seem like a detour until you realize that endurance, not speed, is what actually builds companies. There was Moody's Investor Service in New York. And then in 2005, a six-month move to Israel that turned into a six-year career at Sequoia Capital's Israeli office.
At Sequoia Israel, Resnick spent six years backing early and growth-stage companies across software, internet, and mobile. He had a front-row seat to a specific, expensive problem: IT operations teams at fast-scaling companies couldn't keep up with the velocity and complexity of their own infrastructure. Alerts multiplied. Signal drowned in noise. Engineers burned out fighting fires while the fires kept starting.
He left Sequoia in 2012 to fix it. BigPanda's first attempt - using machine learning to make digital advertising smarter - had nothing to do with IT operations. A year in, the team hit a wall. Rather than return investor capital or close down, they asked a different question: what problem did we actually solve along the way? The answer was their own infrastructure management nightmare. That's the product they built next.
