06 Jul IU Angel Network Invests in YCombinator Graduate
CONTACT INFORMATION:
IU Ventures
ventures@iu.edu
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
IU Angel Network Invests in YCombinator Accelerated Startup Pyroscope
BLOOMINGTON, IN— The IU Angel Network recently invested in Pyroscope, a startup co-founded by IU Kelley School of Business alumnus Ryan Perry. After participating in the YCombinator startup accelerator, Pyroscope’s seed round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from Harvard, Softbank, and SV Angel as well as the IU Angel Network.
“As a graduate of the Kelley School of Business, I think my core experience was incredibly similar to the YCombinator experience,” Perry said. He and co-founder Dmitry Filimonov spent the 3-month YCombinator program coming up with and executing finance, marketing, and operations strategies to grow Pyroscope. “The only difference was that rather than getting letter grades for a successful strategy, a successful demo day for us was raising a 2.5M seed round from investors.”
Ryan Perry, Co-Founder and CEO, Pyroscope (Photo provided)
“IU’s Kelley School of Business focuses on creating innovative business leaders of the future through experiential learning and an unwavering commitment to our students,” said Neil Powell, Strategic Finance Academy Director at the IU Kelley School of Business. “It’s great to see Ryan and Pyroscope bring that intention into practical and exciting reality!”
Perry also cited the benefits of the network and internal tools of YCombinator and praised the accelerator’s ability to pivot during the pandemic. “They were able to seamlessly transition to a fully remote model and still provide all the same benefits.” He praised similar benefits emerging from the IU Angel Network. “We’ve had a ton of support from the IU Angel Network in getting some of our earliest customer intros and even intros to other investors.”
Pyroscope is a continuous code profiling platform that helps developers identify and resolve defects and risks that exist or emerge within code. “It also allows developers to figure out where bottlenecks are in the code in order to minimize the money they spend on cloud servers,” Perry elaborated. “Any application that is running on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or any other cloud infrastructure is in a great position to leverage tools like Pyroscope to be able to monitor and manage their server usage more effectively.”
As Pyroscope is an open-source project, Perry and Filimonov have seen lots of users implementing their product as an essential support for infrastructure. “We plan to use our seed funding to build out our team in order to accommodate our current requests and accelerate our ability to handle future requests!” Perry celebrated.
“Even though this is an early stage investment the need in the market has been proven,” said Jason Whitney, Vice President of Venture Development and Executive Director for the Indiana University Angel Network. “Having an opportunity to invest in a company from the YCombinator portfolio is unique and one we could not pass up. We are thrilled our angels had the opportunity to invest alongside such respected syndicate partners while supporting young Hoosiers chasing their entrepreneurial dreams.”