The Reliability Dispatch
Developer Tools • SaaS
Est. 2018 • Berlin
Company Profile
Checkly
The active reliability layer for developers and agents - monitoring that lives as code, right beside the app it protects.
Company Profile
The active reliability layer for developers and agents - monitoring that lives as code, right beside the app it protects.
The Story
For most of the web's history, monitoring lived somewhere other than the code it watched - in a separate dashboard, configured by clicking through menus, owned by whoever happened to hold the login. Checkly's founders looked at that arrangement and decided it was backwards. If reliability is an engineering problem, they reasoned, then the checks that guard reliability should be written, reviewed, and shipped the same way engineers ship everything else: as code, in a repository, through a pull request.
That conviction became a product category. Checkly is a developer-first synthetic monitoring platform that lets teams define uptime checks, API validations, and full browser journeys in TypeScript or JavaScript, store them in Git, and deploy them with a single CLI command. The checks run from more than twenty locations around the world, roughly 32.5 million times a day, so that when something breaks the alert reaches the engineer before it reaches the customer.
Figures per Checkly public statements and 2024 Series B reporting. Check volume is approximate.
What It Does • Who It Serves
At its core, Checkly answers a simple question on a relentless schedule: is the application working the way a real user expects? To find out, it borrows Microsoft's open-source Playwright framework to drive a real browser through login flows, checkout paths, and search queries, while separate checks hammer API endpoints to confirm they return the right data at the right speed.
The customers who lean on this are, overwhelmingly, the people who build and operate software - platform engineers, SRE teams, and developers who would rather write a test than open a ticket. That base spans the full range, from a solo developer monitoring a side project on the free tier to enterprises such as Vercel, 1Password, CrowdStrike, Airbus, Autodesk, ServiceNow, and Mistral.
The problem Checkly solves is the gap between "the deploy succeeded" and "the product actually works." A green build says the code compiled; it says nothing about whether a customer in Sydney can still complete a purchase. Checkly closes that gap with continuous, production-facing checks and then, when one fails, tries to explain why rather than simply firing an alarm.
That explanation is increasingly the point. With OpenTelemetry support, a failed check hands back the exact trace ID behind the failure, so an engineer can jump from "the checkout broke" to the specific service and span responsible - without stitching together three tools to get there.
Checkly is on a mission to enable engineers to detect and resolve issues 10x faster through code-first synthetic monitoring.- Checkly, on its Series B announcement
Products & Services
Playwright-driven journeys and HTTP checks that run from 20+ locations to mirror real users.
A TypeScript-native workflow to code, test, and deploy monitors alongside your application.
Links a failed check to its OpenTelemetry trace so you land on the responsible span fast.
Compares failures to the last passing run and reads related traces to explain what changed.
Status and job-heartbeat monitors with granular, multi-channel alerting.
Teaches AI coding agents to set up, review, and ship production-ready monitoring as code.
Rounding out the platform are public status pages, intelligent alert routing to Slack, PagerDuty, and webhooks, plus official Terraform and Pulumi providers for teams that manage monitoring the same way they manage cloud infrastructure.
How It's Different
The synthetic monitoring shelf is crowded - Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, Pingdom, and Better Stack all sell versions of it. Checkly's wager is on two fronts: workflow and price. Rather than living in a dashboard bolted onto a broader observability suite, it lives in the codebase. And it positions itself as up to 80% cheaper than the legacy incumbents it competes against.
Comparative claims reflect Checkly's own positioning; relative bars are illustrative.
Business Model & Market
Checkly runs the classic developer-first SaaS playbook. A free tier and self-serve pricing let individual engineers adopt it without a procurement conversation; usage is metered by check volume across Team and Enterprise plans. Adoption that starts with one developer's side project tends to spread across a team and, eventually, into a company-wide contract.
That motion sits inside a large and growing market. As software teams ship faster and lean harder on distributed cloud architectures, the cost of undetected downtime keeps climbing - which is precisely the wager Balderton Capital made when it led the 2024 Series B. Its thesis, in the firm's own framing, is that downtime is a code problem, and code problems are best solved with code.
Checkly's newest frontier extends that logic to machines. As AI agents write and deploy more software, someone has to monitor what they ship. Checkly's Agent Skills aim to make the company's platform the reliability layer those agents reach for - a quiet but strategically pointed bet on where software development is heading.
Funding History
| Round | Amount | Date | Lead / Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | $2.25M | Apr 2020 | Accel, CRV |
| Series A | ~$10M | 2021 | Accel, CRV |
| Series B | $20M | Jul 2024 | Balderton Capital (lead), Accel, CRV, Paul H. Müller |
Series A figure is approximate. Series B brought Balderton Partner Colin Hanna onto the board.
The Founders
Previously founded testing company TestObject, acquired by Sauce Labs, where he later served as GM for Germany and EMEA.
Started Checkly in 2018 after his frustrations with existing monitoring tools; previously co-founded Vamp.io.
Former Director of Sales EMEA at Sauce Labs, bringing the go-to-market side of the founding team.
Who Uses Checkly
Timeline
Tim Nolet starts Checkly in Berlin; Hannes Lenke and Timo Euteneuer join as co-founders.
Accel and CRV back the monitoring and testing platform as it launches commercially.
The CLI, Terraform/Pulumi providers, status pages, and alerting make monitoring version-controlled.
Balderton Capital leads a $20M round; Checkly ships OpenTelemetry-linked Traces for root cause.
Rocky AI root cause analysis and Agent Skills let AI coding agents ship monitoring as code.
Areas of Expertise
Watch & Learn
FAQ
Checkly is a synthetic monitoring and reliability platform that lets engineers define uptime, API, and browser checks as code, running them from 20+ global locations to catch issues before users do.
It's Checkly's approach of storing monitoring checks, alerts, and configuration as version-controlled code in the same repository as your application, deployed via a CLI or Terraform/Pulumi providers.
Over 1,000 customers, from individual developers to enterprises like Vercel, 1Password, CrowdStrike, Airbus, and Mistral.
Checkly has raised $32.25M in total, including a $20M Series B led by Balderton Capital in 2024, with earlier backing from Accel and CRV.
Checkly is developer-first and code-native - built on Playwright with a CLI and infrastructure-as-code providers - and positions itself as up to 80% cheaper than legacy synthetic monitoring tools.