Company Spotlight: Rootly
When an outage strikes, dashboards and email threads don't cut it. Minutes disappear, revenue bleeds, and customer trust erodes. Rootly was built for that crucible, the 2 a.m. firefight where reliability is on trial. By embedding AI-native workflows directly into Slack and Microsoft Teams, Rootly transforms incident response from chaos into order. Teams using it resolve incidents up to 80% faster, cut repeat outages by more than half, and reclaim hours of engineering time. This isn't a bolt-on, it's reliability living inside the conversation.
Rootly's origin story is steeped in firsthand pain. Founded in January 2021, the company emerged from scars earned at scale. JJ Tang, CEO and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, saw outages at Instacart and IBM burn millions in minutes. He carried that urgency into Y Combinator's S21 batch, determined to bring incident response into the channels where teams already move. Quentin Rousseau, CTO, was Instacart's first SRE hire, the engineer tasked with keeping a high-growth rocket ship upright. He had already co-founded PopSQL and engineered infrastructure at Mylk Guys. Together, they built Rootly to replace manual, fragmented incident workflows with precision: AI-first, collaboration-native, and engineered for speed.
The product is surgical. Declare an incident, and Rootly instantly spins up a dedicated channel, escalates responders, and notifies stakeholders. AI agents transcribe war-room huddles, draft root cause analyses, and surface actionable insights. With more than 70 integrations across PagerDuty, Jira, Datadog, and GitHub, Rootly orchestrates the full stack in real time. No wasted context switching, no chasing information, just execution.
The traction is undeniable. In August 2023, Rootly raised a $12M Series A led by Renegade Partners with participation from Google's Gradient Ventures and Uncorrelated Ventures. Growth has surged 400% year-over-year ARR with 100 percent net dollar retention. Over 60,000 incidents are managed annually, saving customers more than 10 hours per incident and reducing repeat failures by 55% within 90 days. Names like NVIDIA, Canva, Figma, Grammarly, LinkedIn, Elastic, and TripAdvisor run Rootly inside their engineering playbooks. This isn't hype, it's adoption at scale.
The timing is sharp. Modern enterprises live with distributed on-call rotations, microservices sprawl, and remote-first teams. Outages aren't edge cases, they're inevitabilities. Legacy tools force engineers into dashboards and documentation while the clock keeps ticking. Rootly flips the equation, embedding the full incident lifecycle inside the collaboration layer where teams already operate. That's not incremental, it's a new category: AI-powered, chat-native reliability.
The team reflects that same DNA. Remote-first with more than 45 employees and a San Francisco base, Rootly builds in squads that own features end to end. Growth is fueled by stipends, mentorship circles, and transparent operations. Well-being is core: flexible schedules, unlimited PTO, and health coverage for US teammates. But the magnet is mission. Rootly hires engineers obsessed with eliminating toil, fluent in SRE and DevOps metrics, and eager to push AI further into resilience.
Rootly is growing across engineering, product, design, customer success, and go-to-market. For those ready to help shape the future of incident management, the moment is now.
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