Qpoint Inc., a startup focused on providing visibility into applications’ external services and traffic for improved performance and security, said Tuesday it has closed a $4 million pre-seed funding round.

Qpoint uses extended Berkeley Packet Filter technology, a feature of the Linux kernel that allows for safe and efficient execution of custom programs inside the kernel without changing source code or loading kernel modules. The company said eBPF technology can give platform teams and operators visibility that can be used to enhance reliability, performance and security. The funds will be used for product development, marketing and sales.

The surging use of third-party integrations means application reliability increasingly depends on external services’ stability, Qpoint notes. Third-party integrations have also introduced new diagnostic issues because of the maze of dependencies and creative vulnerabilities because of blind spots in external requests.

Most large organizations use observability and application performance management tools to manage internal dependencies but they lack visibility into external integrations and traffic.

Qpoint said it provides a purpose-built toolset that provides real-time, granular visibility and control over of traffic flows. EBPF taps into the request flow between primary applications and their external dependencies to provide insights without affecting performance or requiring data to leave the local environment. Benefits include better reliability, faster troubleshooting, reduced cloud spending and reduced security risks.

The company said its service can immediately identify anomalous behavior by external services to minimize impacts on critical applications. Its software continuously tracks external application program interface usage and generates alerts when capacity limits are about to be reached.

Other features include root cause analysis and debugging, cloud bandwidth and billing attribution, API interaction auditing to provide evidence of service level agreement violations, and the ability to provide zero-trust security protections to external endpoints.

Members of Qpoint’s management team hail from Shopify Inc., Instacart Inc., DigitalOcean Inc., Hashicorp Inc. and NSOne Inc. Chief Executive Tyler Flint previously founded Nanobox Inc., a maker of an applications deployment and developer workflow automation platform that was acquired by DigitalOcean.

The funding round was led by Mango Capital Management LLC with participation by Preface Ventures GP LLC, Scribble Ventures Management LLC and Bloomberg LP’s Bloomberg Beta venture arm.

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