Clockwork, developer of technology for time-sensitive applications, announced it has raised $21M in Series A funding led by global venture capital firm NEA with participation from well-known angel investors John Hennessey, Ram Shriram, Neeraj Bharadwaj, and Jerry Yang. Clockwork was co-founded by Yilong Geng, Deepak Merugu, and Balaji Prabhakar with Mendel Rosenblum serving as Chief Scientist and Board Member.
Also Read: Icertis Launches Industry-First Contract Intelligence Solution for Healthcare Providers
The funding accompanies the launch of Clockwork’s Latency Sensei, a powerful and fine-grained sensor of latencies in cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. As the world of computing becomes increasingly virtualized, the underlying infrastructure has become opaque: users cannot access the network elements connecting their virtual machines (VMs) or data containers. Latency Sensei enables a DevOps engineer to see through the fog of virtualization, enabling the user to derive unprecedented visibility, including the ability to measure true one-way delays of a packet or remote procedure call, discover network bottlenecks and “hiccups” (outages lasting a few seconds), and identify underperforming VMs arising from “noisy neighbors.”
“Virtualization has been tremendously successful in enabling the cloud computing revolution,” said Clockwork Chief Scientist and Board Member Mendel Rosenblum. “However, it has also made the cloud opaque, isolating the tenant from the underlying infrastructure. As cloud usage continues to explode, I see our technology developing into something as fundamental as the microscope or the telescope, allowing a tenant to peek into the hidden depths of the cloud infrastructure to ensure their application is being well-served.”
Such information is critical in helping companies assess network latency so they can optimize application performance. Already, Clockwork’s clock synchronization system and/or Latency Sensei have been deployed by eBay, Wells Fargo, and RBC among others to support such critical functions as accurate timestamping, in-order execution of trades, accurate latency measurements, and other functions in on-prem and cloud environments. As more of the world’s computing infrastructure moves to the cloud, Clockwork’s technology is proving critical in sectors such as high-tech, online gaming, and cryptocurrency trading.
Clockwork’s clock synchronization system, based on foundational research conducted at Stanford University, is the revolutionary core driving the company’s technology stack. The system accurately synchronizes clocks on computers in data centers around the world.