We’re excited to announce our Series A investment in Blameless, a complete workbench for teams implementing site reliability engineering (“SRE”) at their companies.

At Accel, we’re pretty long on tools and services that help product teams design (InVision, RealtimeBoard), build (Atlassian, Zeit), and operate (PagerDuty, XebiaLabs) great software. But if there’s one constant to software development, it’s that change is inevitable. So we keep our ears close to the ground to pick up on new models for how products are being built, or how teams collaborate post-deployment.

SRE is one of those groundswell movements that our best companies are embracing. It’s what happens when developers are tasked with ops, teams broadly are tasked with uptime, and companies recognize deliverability as a foundation for customer success. Because if there’s a second constant in software, it’s that failure is inevitable. It’s important to codify a level of downtime that’s acceptable — to help developers navigate the tension between speed and quality — while focusing on the data and processes to get systems back up and running.

Blameless is an operating system to put all the pieces together for any company’s SRE team. Ashar, Lyon and team have lived and breathed SRE at a handful of the best SaaS companies, like Box and Mulesoft. Their culture is dynamic, performant, customer-first, and high-integrity. SRE is fast becoming a best-practice, and we think it will spawn a very large, independent software company. We couldn’t be happier to be on this journey with the Blameless team.