Operations teams are the business builders behind the largest and most complex companies in the world. They are a critical function that brings success, efficiency, and reliability to the organization. For example, at Uber our Operations teams were responsible for marketplace health, supply imbalance, surge multiples, sign-up funnels, vehicle inspections, restaurant uptime, NPS, churn and anything and everything else in between.

Ops are savvy generalists and natural problem solvers. A large part of the role involves identifying and solving for when things go wrong (as they inevitably do). Yet up until now, their jobs have largely been manual and reactive. Even the best Operations teams will describe their role as “firefighting,” where they’re always reacting to something new and focusing on just the biggest fire in front of them, without the ability to prioritize or think ahead.

While other functions like IT and engineering each have robust tools for monitoring and incident response, the same has not existed for operations. Most teams rely on hacked together solutions, like constantly refreshing dashboards or noisy Slack bots combined with an emoji-response system, which has much room for error and no clear way to ensure accountability, traceability or reliability.

This is where we come in. Avenue is the world's first operations observability platform. Avenue aims to bring the same monitoring and incident response engineers have become so accustomed to, to operations teams everywhere. The platform empowers operations teams to achieve more, by giving them back time, removing bottlenecks, and allowing for a renewed focus on solving rather than searching. With Avenue, teams will be empowered to:

• Observe: With Avenue, operations teams can make sure they are notified of when they need their attention on a certain, known problem.

• Act: Next, we ensure the problem is routed to the right team, assigned to the right person, and resolved in time. What was otherwise just a simple “Google Doc Playbook” can now be implemented as a standardized, measurable process embedded across teams.

• Improve: With this new digital footprint, Operations managers and leaders are equipped to ensure accountability, understand priorities, and improve how their team functions.

$4M in seed funding to bring observability tools to operations teams

Avenue first came out of the Y Combinator W21 cohort. As we continue to reach new businesses and expand our product offering, we’ve raised $4M in seed funding led by Accel along with Elad Gil, Lachy Groom, AirAngels, Flexport Inc., and a group of world-class operators from Uber, Coinbase, Thumbtack, Binance, Flexport, Airbnb, and more. While we’re currently working with 50+ organizations as a part of our beta, with the new funding we’re excited to announce general availability of our product that has already powered 200,000 notifications to teams.

"The emergence of the modern data stack makes all operational data available for downstream use, creating opportunities for new applications," said Amit Kumar, partner at Accel. "Avenue's observability and incident response workflow is similar to that of Accel-backed Sentry and PagerDuty, but uniquely focused on equipping ops teams, which increasingly are the backbone of any fast-growing business."

My co-founder, Jeff Barg, and I have been building businesses together for more than a decade. We've known each other since middle school, and have always been on the lookout for opportunities to build and innovate. Together we even created one of the first iPad apps and received hundreds of thousands of downloads from the App Store. Jeff later went on to work on the technology behind Amazon Alexa’s entity resolution (as part of their artificial intelligence team), while I joined Uber as a Product Manager and saw firsthand the issues that our operations teams dealt with on a daily basis. We had built some internal tools that provided, but it became clear that Operations was a growing business-builder that requires the same sophisticated tooling tech teams have used to scale.

Operations will sit at the center of the next generation of startups that address many of the world’s biggest problems. At Avenue we’re building the platform that will power their success, and are just at the beginning of this ambitious journey.

If you want to learn more about how Avenue can work for your business, speak with sales here.