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Cybersecurity practitioners take a community - ram coming to figure out problems . Security researchers share the vulnerabilities they find with the all-embracing cybersecurity residential district , which appropriate companies to patch up their security department holes before something ruinous happens .
Prequelis looking to contribute that same approach to software package .
The startup is building a database of software system failure patterns or misconfigurations in Linux workload . The database is updated by a growing community of engineers and developers who exchange selective information about reliability . Prequel ’s software then sit in a society ’s existing software package slew and consistently checks for bugs and loser by pull from this database .
The company ’s co - founders , Tony Meehan and Lyndon Brown ( pictured above get out to rightfulness ) , both have background in security department ; both worked at the National Security Agency and at cyber process platform company Endgame .
Brown state TechCrunch that when software program fails , applied scientist have to pour over endless data logs to judge to spot the issue before they can start to palliate it . For some software issues , only a few multitude at the company know enough about the programs to even be able to help .
“ We ’ve lived it where I ’ve had to call a former employee in a past life and say , ‘ Hey , I know you left the company , but no one is really read how this particular service works . Can you facilitate us out ? ’ ” Brown sound out . “ We ’ve had customers tell us chronicle about drive to people ’s household in the midsection of the night and knocking on the wrong threshold to kind of get help . ”
Brown and Meehan wonder why there was n’t the same form of system for software system bug as there was for sharing cognition on certificate vulnerabilities . When they note no one was making progression in this arena , they decided to give it a go .
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“ If mass have understand this problem before , you could actually bring to bear your problem , ” Meehan said . “ That was like an anchoring point for us . How do we build a mathematical product much like what we did in security measure 15 long time ago that would unlock this biotic community of people that have visualize known failure in capable reference computer software ? ”
Prequel was launched in 2023 and has been operating in stealth thus far . The company articulate it already has its technical school deploy in a handful of Fortune 500 companies and has progress its community meshwork up to around 500 people .
Now the fellowship is coming out of stealing and announce a $ 3.3 million seed round lead by Work - Bench with engagement from Runtime Ventures , Operator Partners , and a slew of angel investors that understand this problem , admit Shay Banon , the CTO of Elastic , and Jon Oberheide , the former founder and CTO of Duo Security , among others . The capital will be put toward merchandise exploitation and lucubrate the detection library .
Prequel ’s biggest rival are data observability and monitoring products , Brown sound out , which also supervise software for potential failure and bugs . companionship in this place admit Datadog and Splunk .
But Brown argues that observability platforms are only as respectable as the engineering science gift you put in front of them . Moreover , any of these platforms only aid companies harness their catastrophic failures after they bump , whereas Prequel ’s approach enables people to depart tackling job earlier , before they get to the level where only a quality few people have sex how to solve them . He impart that unlike some of these company , they do n’t commove their client for datum transfer either , since all their datum stays with client — they only charge a subscription for the service itself .
The team welcomes competition though , Meehan suppose , as he thinks that more players focused on this space , could be a tide that lifts all boats .
“ bankruptcy is constant in modern diligence , and teams are really only able to get to the failures that are like catastrophic or the failures that are have like customer shock , ” Brown said . “ What we ’re really excited about is enabling teams to really get a better handle on the sight of problems that be and being capable to make prioritization decision . ”