AppSignal secures $22 million to drive US & EU growth

AppSignal has secured $22 million in Series A funding to support its international expansion and growth in the application performance monitoring (APM) market, alongside the appointment of a new Chief Executive Officer and an expansion into the United States.

The funding round was led by Elsewhere Partners. The investment will be used to accelerate AppSignal's strategy in serving mid-market organisations that require comprehensive yet straightforward and scalable APM solutions. As part of its global expansion efforts, AppSignal has established a new U.S. office in Austin, Texas.

Rod Favaron, Operating Partner at Elsewhere Partners, commented on the state of the APM market and the rationale for the investment. "The fragmented APM market is evolving quickly - enterprise observability platforms have become extremely costly and complex for midsize development teams, while lightweight tools lack comprehensive application monitoring coverage."

"AppSignal fills a significant gap in the midmarket, empowering developers with robust, end-to-end monitoring of their business-critical applications in one simple interface," Favaron said. "We're excited to support AppSignal's accelerated expansion and unlock its next chapter of growth."

AppSignal's platform provides APM and logging solutions tailored to various environments, programming languages, and frameworks. The company reports that its solutions are used by development teams at over 2,000 organisations across more than 60 countries to improve software deployment confidence and end-user experiences.

One customer, Level RMM, highlighted the platform's role in enhancing service reliability and customer satisfaction. 

Jacob Haug, Chief Executive Officer at Level RMM, stated, "AppSignal has become indispensable to our operations at Level. They provide us with comprehensive visibility into our application's performance and stability, enabling our team to address potential issues before they impact our end users. This proactive approach has dramatically improved our service reliability and customer satisfaction."

AppSignal currently supports several key programming languages, including Elixir, Java, node.js, Python, and Ruby. The company intends to broaden its language support and invest further in product development, customer service, and operational capacity. Efforts will focus particularly on expanding in the United States while maintaining leadership in European markets.

The company has announced the appointment of Brandon Swalve as Chief Executive Officer. Swalve is based in Austin, Texas, and brings two decades of experience in building product-oriented teams and corporate strategies. His prior roles include Senior Vice President of go-to-market operations and analytics at Tricentis, which followed his co-founding of Linq Analytics. He has also held positions with SolarWinds, W Energy, and McKinsey & Company. Swalve holds an MBA in marketing and strategy from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a Bachelor of Science in industrial engineering from Northwestern University.

On joining AppSignal, Swalve commented, "I have been incredibly impressed by the product lineup, customer successes and market traction that AppSignal has been able to cultivate. I am looking forward to working with the founders to build on the strong foundation they have established by expanding the AppSignal team, speeding innovation, and scaling our marketing and sales efforts to deliver our developer-centric solutions to a broader audience."

The company will continue strengthening its European-based team while enhancing executive leadership, go-to-market, and customer support teams in North America. The founding team, comprising Roy Tomeij, Thijs Cadier, and Wes Oudshoorn, will continue to serve as Chief Customer Officer, Chief Technology Officer, and Chief Product Officer, respectively, with their focus remaining on product development and customer experience.

Roy Tomeij explained the strategic growth of the company: "Software developers need better APM and logging solutions to manage increasingly complex environments; it was clear we needed to significantly grow our European team and expand into North America to meet the intense demand. The Elsewhere team has a deep understanding of the developer ecosystem, and their support and guidance will help us continue to deliver the exceptional service and support our current customers have come to expect while we scale."

As part of the growth financing arrangement, Rod Favaron will lead AppSignal's Board of Directors as Executive Chair, with support from Nick Stoffregen, Partner at Elsewhere Partners. AppSignal plans to use Elsewhere's network to attract additional operational leadership and support as it scales its operations and market reach.