In the early days of the SaaS and Cloud-based version of the Portland startup community, Jeff Martens was one of the more active, engaged, and recognizable figures in the community. His first startup — a product of Portland Startup Weekend called CPUsage — created a service that provided on-demand high-performance computing services to customers by leveraging idle time on vast arrays of participating machines.
CPUsage would go on to become one of the hottest Portland startups at the time, raise nearly $1 million in venture capital, grow a team in Portland, and appear on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. Unfortunately, the promising company wound up shuttering its product almost exactly eight years ago. And eventually closing its doors altogether.
Following the closure, Jeff remained active in the tech and startup community, taking on a variety of roles at well-known tech companies like New Relic and Pager Duty both in Portland and the Bay Area.
Clearly, he was taking the opportunity to hone his skills — and apparently, recharge his batteries. Because now he’s back in Portland to take another crack at leading an early-stage startup. Meet, Metrist, another venture-funded pursuit that just opened its public beta, today.
So what does Metrist do?
Metrist is for anyone that goes on-call to support software built on the public cloud. Like an optometrist for their patients, we give our users visibility into the performance, functionality, and availability of the world’s most built-upon cloud products.
We do this by continuously testing the functionality of more than 40 cloud products, from regions all over North America. These aren’t simple ping checks, but full, end-to-end functional tests, ensuring successful calls and correct, expected responses. The result is a single place to monitor and alert on the real-time health of all of the supported services you care about, with specific and detailed insight into service status, as much as 80 minutes faster than relying on a vendor’s status page.
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times. Portland could use more serial founders. So it’s great to see Jeff back on the startup track. It will be interesting to see where this goes, given the breadth of experience he — and his team — bring to bear on this new company and the startup community.
For more information or to sign up for the public beta, visit Metrist.
