Why We Built AutonomaThe Founders' Story

It was 3:17 AM on a Tuesday when everything changed. I was staring at my phone, trying to make sense of yet another cryptic alert. "Database connection pool exhausted." The same issue we'd "fixed" three times that month. As I dragged myself to my laptop, I had a moment of clarity: This is insane.

The Problem We All Share

Before founding Autonoma, we were engineers at some of the world's largest tech companies. Between us, we'd worked at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and several high-growth startups. Despite the different company sizes and cultures, one thing remained constant: the soul-crushing reality of on-call duty.

The Lightbulb Moment

"I called my co-founder the next morning. 'What if we built a system that could learn from every incident, predict problems before they happen, and fix them automatically?' His response: 'When do we start?'"

From Idea to Reality

We realized this wasn't just a tooling problem—it was a fundamental flaw in how we approach software operations.

Building Something Different

We didn't want to build another monitoring tool. The world has plenty of those. We wanted to build something that would fundamentally change the relationship between engineers and their systems.

The Early Days

Our first prototype was rough. We installed it on our own infrastructure (eating our own dog food) and watched it learn. The first successful prediction came two weeks later: it detected an impending disk space issue 72 hours before it would have caused an outage.

But the real validation came when we gave early access to a friend's startup. After one month, their lead engineer sent us a message that still hangs on our office wall:

"For the first time in three years, I took a vacation without my laptop. Thank you."

Where We Are Today

Three years later, Autonoma protects thousands of applications worldwide. We've prevented millions of incidents and given countless engineers their nights and weekends back. But we're just getting started.

Every time we hear from a customer who's eliminated on-call stress, who's shipping faster because they're not fighting fires, or who's simply happier at work—it reminds us why we started this journey.

The Future We're Building

We envision a world where:

• Software systems are self-healing and continuously improving
• Engineers focus on innovation, not operations
• 3 AM wake-up calls are a distant memory
• Every team, regardless of size, has access to world-class reliability

The Personal Side

Building Autonoma hasn't just changed our customers' lives—it's changed ours too. We sleep better knowing our systems are protected. We take real vacations. We're present for our families. We remember why we fell in love with engineering in the first place.

"My 8-year-old daughter asked me what I do at work. I told her I build robots that help computers fix themselves so other dads and moms don't have to wake up at night. She said that's the coolest job ever. I couldn't agree more."

— Co-founder, Autonoma

Here's to peaceful nights and productive days.

— The Autonoma Team