Startup Polar Signals Inc. has raised $6.8 million in fresh funding for its continuous profiling platform, which helps developers reduce their applications’ hardware usage. 

The company announced the raise today. The investment, which comes as an extension to a $4 million seed round Polar Signals secured in 2021, included the participation of Alphabet Inc.’s GV fund, Spark Capital and Lightspeed. The founders of several venture-backed developer tooling startups participated as well.

When a piece of code activates within an application, it receives a certain amount of RAM that it can use to store data. Once the code completes its task, the RAM it received is recovered by the application in a process known as garbage collection. Failing to recover memory resources can increase a workload’s hardware use, which may lead to unnecessary costs.

Finding code that performs garbage collection incorrectly can be a complex and time-consuming process. Polar Signals offers a continuous profiling platform, Polar Signals Cloud, that promises to ease the process. It can also spot other causes of excess memory use, as well as code snippets that consume more processor resources than they should.

The platform is based on an open-source project called Parca. The latter tool can likewise help developers troubleshoot applications that use too much hardware, but has certain scalability limitations. Polar Signals Cloud combines Parca with an open-source columnar database called FrostDB to address those limitations, which allows it to run in larger application environments.

The platform collects data about applications’ infrastructure usage with a technology called eBPF. Available as part of Linux, the technology can use the operating system on which a workload runs to track that workload’s hardware resource consumption. Moreover, it do so in a way that uses relatively little processing power. 

Polar Signals says that developers can integrate its platform into their application with one line of code. There’s no need to perform instrumentation, or the task of updating an application with code that tracks its hardware usage. Polar Signals Cloud visualizes excess hardware usage patterns in dashboards to speed up troubleshooting.

The company announced its latest funding round today in conjunction with a new feature, Performance Optimizations, that promises to further ease troubleshooting tasks. It uses artificial intelligence to suggest ways that developers can make their code more hardware-efficient. The feature is currently in alpha.

According to TechCrunch, Polar Signals has more than a dozen paying customers including Ubuntu developer Canonical Ltd. The company will use the proceeds from its latest funding round to grow its installed base and hire more employees. 

Image: Polar Signals