Why Blume Partnered With Zipy.Ai In Their Mission Of Making The World Less Buggy

We are very excited to lead Zipy.ai’s seed round and partner with them in their journey to build a world class customer observability platform that helps software teams debug customer code bugs 10x faster. Zipy essentially combines user sessions with frontend monitoring, to help connect the dots between what one’s customers did and where a problem occurred in a code while maintaining privacy of their customers – In a nutshell, they enable developers and multiple other personas in an organization remove the guesswork from identifying issues and bugs, as well as understand their customers better. 

Our conviction in Zipy was pretty much built over a matter of a week and our first interaction happened quite fortuitously thanks to one of the sessions during Blume Day 2021 in which we spoke about Consumerization of the Enterprise – One of the panelists during Blume Day was excited by the vision we had when it came to PLG companies and suggested that we speak with Zipy.ai since they were building with missionary focus on their end user personas. We were absolutely blown away by the vision that Vishalini Paliwal had, however the conviction was built on the back of the following pillars:

Founding team and their ability to attract the best possible talent

Our first interaction with Vishalini was probably the best and most lucid first call we have had with any founder who was building such a complex product. Her clarity of thought and deep expertise of over 20 years as both a developer and a product leader across multiple world class companies made it clear how deeply she identified with the problem, and we had no doubts about her being the best person to solve it. In addition, she had worn the hat of a founder twice before and as a product management leader had also seen the scale-up journey of Mindtickle from zero to attaining unicorn status. 

At the same time, Vishalini had attracted some of the best engineers and product managers across the industry and at the same time convinced some marquee operator angels from the Valley, who had built multi-billion dollar companies, to come in as investors. The very fact that she could make some of the very best of their trade believe in her vision was a testament to her ability to not only build like a boss but also her ability to sell like one 🙂

Deep problem and scale of the market opportunity 

Dec 31st 1999, the world was allegedly going to come to a stop, and the US government had spent ~$100B to prevent that, one would think it was an apocalypse but it was just a tiny little software bug called Y2K. We are currently in 2022, and with software eating the world, bugs aren’t far behind from eating software. Whether it is customers churning out due to a bad experience or loss of business due to payment gateways not working, bugs can cost a company dearly. When a company scales up really fast, it is inevitable for technical debt to creep in and it isn’t uncommon for that debt to raise its ugly head as a bug. It is imperative to continuously monitor customer issues and understand the criticality or business impact of a bug. 

On the bright side, software teams, PMs, CSMs, and almost every persona in a tech driven organization are keen to understand the impact of bugs and want to minimize the impact of bugs by proactively observing their customers. There are close to 30M developers globally, and we believe it is only the first persona whose life that Zipy can simplify – The market opportunity is undoubtedly enormous!

Strong product vision with a very clear GTM strategy 

Having been a developer and a product leader for more than half of her life, Vishalini deeply understood the friction around stitching data across multiple tools and logs to identify issues, the alert fatigue originating from trying to solve every issue identified, and she also knew that monitoring tools aren’t a luxury that all software teams can afford. By combining session playbacks and monitoring in one, Zipy not only allows software teams to pinpoint where bugs have originated with minimal hops to reduce the TTR by 10x, but also helps replace expensive monitoring tools. The privacy first approach from day one and the quality of UI/UX in the MVP itself was world class. It was quite obvious that the product from day one was being built keeping the end user in mind which was further validated by the ease with which one could experience the product. In addition, the team’s ability to drive extremely appealing content and being obsessed with the end user’s problems further strengthened our belief in the team’s ability to drive a lot of community love to build a bottoms up GTM motion. 

In a very short period of time, Zipy has been used by 100+ users, and captured over 4.5M errors. They have deployed their product with industry leaders such as Mindtickle, TechEdison, Pazcare, etc., and have also attained #1 product of the day on Producthunt. 

All of this has been achieved in a short duration of hardly 6 months, and we at Blume Ventures are super excited about what lies ahead in the journey of Zipy!