ExtraHop Hauls In $5.1M to Help Companies Manage Their Networks Efficiently

And the hits keep coming. In a busy week for financing deals, Seattle-based ExtraHop Networks is announcing today it has raised a $5.1 million Series A round, led by Madrona Venture Group. Prominent angel investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz also participated in the funding round, which closed at the end of February.

ExtraHop, which jumped out of stealth mode in December, makes software to help corporate information-technology organizations monitor their applications environments and network transactions. The overall effect is to let both network operations teams and applications teams troubleshoot IT problems. That’s unusual, as most available tools are targeted to one group or the other. “It’s like Google Earth for networks. It’s a great tool for reactively exploring what might have caused specific problems,” says Jesse Rothstein, ExtraHop’s co-founder and CEO.

He means you can see IT problems from a high level, and zoom in and out to investigate possible causes. Rothstein is a hardcore techie, a veteran senior architect from Seattle’s F5 Networks, so he throws around terms like TCP alerts, packet sniffers, and seven-layer networking models as if they were items on a grocery list. Helen Tang, ExtraHop’s vice president of marketing, gives some real-world context when she points out that a networking problem might be that your chief financial officer can’t send an e-mail because too many computing resources are being directed to your company’s firewall at the same time. “The network is so mission-critical to any business these days,” she says.

If there’s a common theme to software companies we’re hearing a lot about these days, it’s the ability to help businesses manage their IT costs and do more with less. Some local examples of this broader trend would be Apptio (IT optimization), Skytap (virtual machines), and Symform (data storage). “One message that resonates in the current economic climate is to help understaffed teams work efficiently,” Rothstein says. “We help organizations make their existing IT systems and infrastructure work fast and reliably.”

Rothstein and fellow F5 veteran Raja Mukerji founded ExtraHop in January 2007. They landed seed funding from Madrona and other private investors in November 2007, and began selling

Author: Gregory T. Huang

Greg is a veteran journalist who has covered a wide range of science, technology, and business. As former editor in chief, he overaw daily news, features, and events across Xconomy's national network. Before joining Xconomy, he was a features editor at New Scientist magazine, where he edited and wrote articles on physics, technology, and neuroscience. Previously he was senior writer at Technology Review, where he reported on emerging technologies, R&D, and advances in computing, robotics, and applied physics. His writing has also appeared in Wired, Nature, and The Atlantic Monthly’s website. He was named a New York Times professional fellow in 2003. Greg is the co-author of Guanxi (Simon & Schuster, 2006), about Microsoft in China and the global competition for talent and technology. Before becoming a journalist, he did research at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. He has published 20 papers in scientific journals and conferences and spoken on innovation at Adobe, Amazon, eBay, Google, HP, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other organizations. He has a Master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.