How My Startup Got New Funding from Andreessen Horowitz

We are very excited to announce that we have raised a new round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with participation from Y Combinator Continuity and existing investors.

This fundraise comes at the back of our impressive growth, as we are now sending billions of webhooks a year for some of the most sophisticated engineering teams at companies both large (Fortune 500) and small (startups).

Companies like Brex, Lob, Benchling, Bizzabo, and LTSE Equity, all use Svix to power their webhooks.

We have gotten to know the a16z and YC Continuity teams well over the last few months, and we are excited to be working with them for years to come, as well as continuing working with our amazing existing investors: Aleph, Y Combinator, Andrew Miklas, Yuri Sagalov (Wayfinder), Kevin Mahaffey (SNR), Christopher Golda (Rogue Capital), Jason Warner, Ian Storm Taylor, Kurt Mackey, Hana Mohan, Holly Dunlap, and Michael Orland.

Today is an important milestone towards our mission of making server-to-server communication easy, secure, and reliable.

So I want to take this opportunity to thank the team for getting us to where we are today. I love waking up every day and being surrounded by such smart and passionate individuals, serving amazing customers, and working with the best investors out there!

What is Svix?

To talk about Svix, we first need to talk about webhooks.

Webhooks are how services communicate; you can think of them as sort of a reverse API, or as the API equivalent of push notifications. They power most of the products that we all use on a daily basis.

For example: when you make a payment online, a webhook is sent from the payment provider to the merchant; when you push a commit to Github, a webhook is sent to the CI providers to trigger a build; and when you use a workflow automation tool like Zapier, the workflows are almost always triggered by webhooks.

Webhooks have also become an increasingly common customer demand, both by API providers and more importantly API consumers. We see this trend across all industries, where customers expect webhooks in order to be able to take action on events without having to poll for updates. It makes sense, as webhooks enable building workflows on top of products, turning them from useful into critical infrastructure, increasing both stickiness and usefulness.

The problem, however, is that building a reliable webhook service requires a lot more engineering time, resources, and ongoing maintenance than you first expect. Which is especially painful, as it diverts valuable resources from improving the product, to reinventing infrastructure. We believe webhooks will follow a similar development pattern to other internet infrastructure—like email, web servers, and CMS—which only a few teams build on their own.

That's where Svix comes in. With Svix, companies can build a secure, reliable, and scalable webhooks solution in minutes. Saving them a lot of time, effort, and money, while focusing on their business and increasing team happiness.

Looking back

Milestones are always a great time to reflect on the past. Looking back, I'm really proud of the product we have built, and how we've been supporting our customers. It never gets old to hear "wow, that was really fast" when we release a new feature shortly after discussing it with a customer. We deserve some credit for that (and we work hard to earn it), but a lot of the credit also belongs to our customers. We are very lucky to have such engaged customers, and doubly lucky to have them be developers. We often get very detailed feedback, specced out feature requests, and of course pull requests for both the code and the docs.

I think this has also been the secret to why our customers love the product so much. It's because they helped us build it every step of the way, and they still do to this day. The same way it never gets old to hear about how fast we move with product development, it also never gets old to hear about how people use the product and how much they love it.

This is by far one of the best products I've ever worked with. It does one thing but it does it so well that I can't imagine ever doing my own webhooks solution.

- Senior Engineering Manager at Bizzabo

One super important but often underappreciated aspect of what we do, is the relentless focus on stability and scalability. We spend a lot of time and work really hard to ensure that we provide our customers with a robust service at the scale they need. Whether it's the quality of the code, the test suite, the infrastructure, or our SDLC, we always hold ourselves to the highest standards. It's one of those things that no one notices when you do your job well, but are essential for any infrastructure service.

At the end of the day, however, it's not about what we have built, but rather how we are affecting the lives of our customers. Thanks to Svix our customers can offer a state of the art webhooks solution to their customers at a fraction of the time and cost it would take to build it themselves, with no ongoing maintenance, while getting constant improvements and automatic scaling. All of this while freeing their engineering teams to work on their core business. For more on that, you can see what Lob had to say about their experience switching to Svix.

Looking forward

We have identified an important (and growing) problem, built a great product to solve it, and started a whole new vertical along the way (webhooks as a service). This is why our customers, our investors, and the Svix team are so excited about webhooks and what we are building.

We have an opportunity to become an industry defining company, which is why we have decided to raise this round of funding, and partner with some of the best investors out there. We are going to use the money and the support of our new investors, to further expand the team and improve the product to keep up with the demand and our ever evolving customer needs. We have a lot of exciting stuff lined up, and we can't wait to share them!

If you are passionate about developer tools, webhooks, and server-to-server communication and you think you may be a good fit, please check out our careers page.

If your company is looking to start sending webhooks, or upgrade their existing legacy solution, try us out or check out our docs.

Also published here.