Application monitoring startup AppSignal B.V. said today it’s looking to expand its market presence beyond Europe after closing on a $22 million early-stage funding and hiring a new chief executive.

The Series A round was led by Elsewhere Partners and saw the participation of several other unnamed investors.

AppSignal is an Amsterdam-based startup that claims to have developed a powerful and comprehensive application monitoring tool that supports numerous programming languages and various computing environments and frameworks.

The tool is purpose-built for mid-size developer teams, minimizing the complexity associated with better-known observability platforms such as Datadog and Observe, while still providing maximum coverage. It helps developer teams automate workflow monitoring, identify and respond to performance issues, mitigate problems before they occur and enhance user experiences, all within a very simple and easy-to-follow user interface.

The company says its tool is already being used by more than 2,000 organizations, mostly in Europe, helping them to ship application code with the greater confidence. However, its founders are not satisfied with their initial success, and have ambitions to expand the company globally, with a specific focus on U.S. enterprises.

To that end, AppSignal decided that the time is right to take on a new CEO to lead that expansion, and it’s turning to the experienced software industry executive Brandon Swalve.

Swalve has spent more than two decades working with product-led teams targeting U.S, markets. He possesses vital experience, having recently served as the senior vice president of go-to-market operations and analytics at the software testing company Tricentis Inc. Prior to that, he held senior positions at SolarWinds Corp. and the analyst firm Mckinsey & Co., and also helped co-found a startup called Linq Analytics Inc.

According to Swalve, he decided to take up the challenge of growing AppSignal because he was “impressed by the product lineup, customer successes and market traction.” He added that he plans to build on this foundation by expanding the company’s teams, accelerating innovation and scaling its marketing and sales efforts.

One of the first things Swalve will do is direct efforts to expand AppSignal to cover additional programming languages. The platform currently supports Elixir, Java, node.js, Python and Ruby, and it intends to add many more to that list, the CEO said. Meanwhile, to target more U.S.-based customers, the company will create dedicated customer service and operations teams to address that market.

AppSignal’s three co-founders, Roy Tomeij, Thijs Cadier and Wes Oudshoorn, plan to stick around at the company, focused on customers, technology and product, respectively.

Tomeij said the company chose to work with Elsewhere Partners because of its “deep understanding” of the developer ecosystem and the challenges it faces. “Software developers need better APM and logging solutions to manage increasingly complex environments,” he said.

Elsewhere Partners Operating Partner Rod Favaron said there’s a huge gap in the market for application monitoring tools. He believes enterprise-grade observability platforms are too expensive and complicated for midsized teams, while more lightweight tools are lacking in terms of their overall coverage, making them ineffective.

“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,” he said.

Image: AppSignal