CtrlB’s Second Innings: From Debugging Code To Filtering Bad Data

For the new age tech industry and for AI companies, data is as good as ‘oil’. Just as crude oil fuelled the development of automobiles, petroleum, chemicals and manufacturing around the world in the 20th century, quality data has become a crucial component for the growth of new age tech companies like Eternal, Swiggy, Paytm, and others in the new millennium.

And with AI well and truly at the centre of things today, it’s an arms race for good data. 

Needless to emphasise, today’s tech companies collect vast amounts of user data through their platforms, to personalise the experience and push key business drivers to the end user. Data also governs how companies make business decisions. Any enterprise or startup’s operations can literally derail from bad data issues.

Bad data can lead to various challenges such as data downtime and incorrect decisions made on poor-quality data, costing companies millions of dollars.

To add more context, a five-year-old Gartner research study found that poor data quality can cost an organisation $12.9 Mn a year. This figure may have increased multifold in today’s time. Apart from monetary losses, data engineers and analysts lose productivity while fixing data quality issues.

Adarsh Srivastava, the founder of CtrlB, recognised this pain point very early in his career and saw a gap in a space where traditional data observability platforms were unable to provide cost competitiveness to growing new-age companies. But before CtrlB launched its Control Plane and CtrlB Flow, foraying into the data observability space, Srivastava started with a different product.

The Idea And The Motivation

Srivastava, a technology enthusiast, has been coding since he was 14. Following his interest and passion, he completed his bachelors in technology from IIT Kanpur. After graduating, he had an early stint at building a job placement portal for universities and corporates, bridging the gap between industry and academia, and also had a founder stint with ZKLabs, which helped developers code faster.

After juggling his early stints as a founder and working as a software developer in the enterprise tech sector for about four years, he realised that organisations and developers spend huge amounts of time fixing problems when their applications go down. “One of the biggest pain points that any developer faces is debunking issues. If something is broken, the server is down. They say, ‘What do I do next?’ And this is where they end up wasting most of their time being unproductive,” said Srivastava.

Seeing this opportunity, Srivastava founded CtrlB in 2023 with his cofounder Mayank Singh Chauhan. 

Initially, the duo developed a live debugging platform that helped developers scrawl through huge amounts of data and code to find bugs during downtime without compromising the performance of the application.

However, to gain early traction, the platform was offered to enterprises for free. But afterwards, when the founders tried to monetise the product, they faced challenges.

“When we approached the enterprises and developers who were using our product, their response was that we don’t measure productivity of our programmers when it comes to solving downtimes. So we can’t put a price tag on what we can’t measure,” said Srivastava.

Failing to scale the product, Srivastava’s other cofounder Chauhan decided to part ways. But Srivastava still wanted to keep CtrlB alive and decided to build its data observability platform, Control Plane, which was launched just four months ago. During the course, Srivastava onboarded Balasubramanian P as a cofounder and raised $2.5 Mn in its seed round led by Chiratae Ventures, with participation from Equirus, InnovateX Fund, Campus Fund and Point One Capital. Prior to this round, the startup had raised about $300K.

How CtrlB Filters Bad Data

Within tech, data observability is a process that helps monitor the critical data companies collect, which silos it comes from and the quality or the trust for each data point. One can say that it works as a health-check platform for your data.

CtrlB uses the deployment model to link into an enterprise’s data tools and sources and, after the piloting and testing phase, developers can use CtrlB’s platform to monitor their data. As part of the monitoring process, the platform alerts the team before any downtime or crashes, when there is any issue with the data.

According to Srivastava, while there are other platforms like Zoho’s Site24x7 and SigNoz that offer similar services, CtrlB’s indexing technology sets it apart, helping teams find and pinpoint issues by scanning through large volumes of data faster, which saves time. Moreover, the startup stores all the data on cloud storage, which is much cheaper than using hard disks, keeping their operational costs lower and enabling better pricing for clients.

As part of its pricing model, CtrlB’s paid version starts at $0.2 per GB for unlimited data ingestion. While Site24x7’s lite model starts at $9 per month and SigNoz charges about $49 per month. However, SigNoz offers more flexibility in terms of pricing.

“Yes, as the load of data ingested increases with time, the price will increase but comparatively we will still remain cheaper than others,” claimed Srivastava.

 

Since CtrlB is a new brand in the data observability space, it still needs to gain industry trust, as leakage of vital data and operational bottlenecks are always a risk. But CtrlB is in the process of acquiring SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications, which will help it gain credibility in the market. Moreover, it is also in the process of filing its patent for the indexing technology.

Currently, CtrlB is in the pre-revenue stage and hopes to close the current financial year (FY26) with an ARR of $100K (about INR 90 Lakh) and increase its customer base. The startup is looking to onboard about 15 companies operating across the logistics, fintech, ecommerce and SaaS sectors in India and the US.

Since in India the deal closure cycle is quite slow, the startup is banking on the interest it is receiving from some prospective customers in the US and aims to tap into the global data observability market, which is expected to cross the $4 Bn mark by 2030.

But it remains to be seen whether CtrlB can manage to create a niche for itself on the back of its proprietary indexing technology and emerge as a cheaper alternative for enterprises.

[Edited by: Nikhil Subramaniam]