New Relic, Inc., a leading provider of Ruby on Rails application performance management solutions, today announced it has received $3.5 million in first-round venture financing from Benchmark Capital. The company plans to use the funds to drive product development and to expand sales and marketing programs. Benchmark Capital general partner Peter Fenton will join the company’s board of directors.

New Relic offers RPM™, a subscription-based Rails Performance Management solution that enables developers to quickly and cost effectively detect, diagnose and fix application performance problems in real time. This software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering is currently available to a limited customer base as a private beta, but will be generally available to the entire Ruby on Rails community soon.

The company was founded by Lewis Cirne, a seasoned entrepreneur, technologist and enterprise software pioneer who founded Wily Technology in 1998. Mr. Cirne served as Wily’s chief executive officer for the first four years and subsequently as chief technical officer. He invented its flagship performance management solution, Introscope, and played a key role in Wily’s 2006 acquisition by CA, Inc. Most recently Mr. Cirne was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital.

"The explosive growth of Ruby on Rails parallels Java in the late ’90s," said Mr. Fenton. "Similar to the innovation that enabled Wily to exceed $100 million in revenue in the Java market, Lewis’ breakthrough invention for Rails monitoring establishes New Relic as the leader for Rails performance management."

New Relic RPM provides deep visibility into the performance of production Rails applications.  The real-time metrics provided through New Relic RPM are presented in the context of the running application through an easy to understand graphical interface, allowing rapid discovery and analysis of performance bottlenecks and the pieces of the applications causing them.   New Relic RPM installs as a Rails plug-in in seconds allowing critical performance data to be collected immediately.

"New Relic’s superb monitoring tools gave us deep insight into the performance bottlenecks of our application," said private beta customer Rick Olson, a member of the core Ruby on Rails development team, and lead developer of the popular SaaS website, www.lighthouseapp.com. "We had more time to add new features and fix the issues, rather than scanning through piles of log files."

"Our goal as a company is simple: to make Rails developers’ lives easier and enable their web applications to scale and perform exceptionally well," said Mr. Cirne, chief executive officer of New Relic. "Rather than wasting valuable time fixing problems, we want developers doing what they do best—creating great applications that move the Rails market forward. I’m thrilled to be working closely again with Peter, whom I consider to be one of the very best venture investors in web infrastructure software, and I am looking forward to building an exciting company in this attractive and growing market."

About Benchmark Capital

Benchmark Capital, a leading international venture capital firm, was founded in 1995 to help talented entrepreneurs with original ideas build successful technology companies. Benchmark’s general partners take a team-oriented, labor-intensive approach to venture investing to deliver a superior level of service to the firm’s portfolio companies. Benchmark’s portfolio includes high-profile start-ups like Infinera, MySQL, OpenTable, Second Life, Tellme, Yelp, and Zillow, and franchise companies such as eBay, Juniper Networks and Red Hat. The firm manages nearly $2.8 billion in committed venture capital. For more information on Benchmark Capital, visit its website at www.benchmark.com.