Maybe it was edited later, but the post now says "(>$10M)". I interpret that as $10–19M. That's not great for a product that's been around for 9 years.
I consulted a similar company in their space ~5 years ago. What I found was that the way to make money in K8s automation/monitoring is to position it as a security solution. That's what Snyk did and they've been killing it, reaching $7B valuation as of last year. Both the company I was advising and Weave.works decided to stick to the developer productivity story and unfortunately both have now shut down. There are many factors to a company's success but it doesn't help to be positioned as a solution that's seen as just a "nice-to-have" or part of a "best practice."
Productivity is a hard sell for a company that is tech focused. Since a client basically can't measure the impact there is little external difference between a true solution and a fake solution. As a result even if you convince someone of the value a company that focuses on marketing to those paying the bills will win out against one that focused on building a better product.
Security has fairly proscriptive compliance requirements (ie: SOC, etc.) which provide a benchmark against which to measure impact. Not impact on security but impact on meeting the compliance requirements.
I think, in simpler terms. There's always a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). But, there's rarely a Chief Productivity Officer. It's usually the CTO et al fighting for dev productivity if any, else nobody just cares and you get impenetrable tarball software
Is that because as soon as you become a so-called security product you are now selling to the CISO org?
My experience with the CISO org is that they love buying expensive B2B enterprise products that have very limited real-life use-cases but are really good at checking boxes. That whole cloud-native security industry is full of FUD and fear-based selling to non technical organizations
From the LinkedIn post. Does this mean $100 MRR / ARR ?