Executive Profile
Nishant Modak is the Founder and CEO of Last9, a technology company focused on high cardinality observability and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) solutions for modern, large-scale software infrastructure. Modak is based in Sunnyvale, CA, with significant business activity reported in both San Francisco and across North America.
Education & Career Background
- Academic Credentials: Nishant Modak holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the Pune Institute of Computer Technology (Class of 2006).
- Professional Experience: Over a decade of hands-on experience as a software reliability engineer, with expertise in software development, agile methodologies, and web applications.
- Thought Leadership: Recognized industry voice, member of the Forbes Technology Council and consistent contributor to the technology thought leadership space via articles, podcasts, and interviews.
- Media & Public Engagement: Modak is regularly featured or quoted in major tech media (Forbes, The New Stack, CNBC TV18) and is active in the developer and SRE community via AMAs and technical content.
Company Overview: Last9
Last9 (founded in 2020 by Nishant Modak and Piyush Verma) delivers a single-pane observability platform for logs, traces, and metrics, built specifically for high cardinality, complex microservice environments.
- Product Positioning:
- OpenTelemetry native, Cloud Native, and Prometheus compatible, offering support for over 100 integrations.
- Distinctive pricing strategy: "Pay for what you use", explicitly avoiding per-host or per-user charges — aligned with modern SaaS and cloud consumption models.
- Focus areas: Logs Management & Analysis, Application Performance Monitoring, High Cardinality Monitoring.
- Key Use Cases:
- Reduces "mean time to discovery" for system failures from hours/days to minutes by mapping software infrastructure, providing fast root-cause analysis.
- Highlights change intelligence capabilities, enabling customers to proactively assess risk when adding or modifying microservices.
- Notable reference account: Disney+ Hotstar, which uses Last9 to ensure observability for streaming the Indian Premier League to 30 million concurrent users.
- Customer Base & Company Scale:
- Initial flagship customer(s): Disney+ Hotstar, among others in high-scale streaming and digital domains.
- Company size: 11–50 employees (growth-stage startup).
- Geographical focus: North America (initial target market), but the platform is geographically agnostic.
- Financials:
- In April 2022, Last9 announced an $11 million Series A funding round, led by Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV) and Better Capital, following an earlier $2 million raised from Sequoia Surge in April 2020.
- Certifications: Last9 holds SOC2 Type 2 compliance.
Industry Recognition & Thought Leadership
- Forbes Technology Council: Modak is a recognized expert contributor, with published insights on:
- Legacy application modernization
- Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) management pitfalls
- Data streaming solution best practices
- Onboarding for tech teams
- Media & Conference Appearances:
- Forbes profile: In-depth feature on Last9’s mission to reduce complexity in cloud-native environments and eliminate software downtime risk.
- CNBC TV18: Interviewed about building "cricket-scale" (massively scalable) infrastructure.
- AppDevANGLE podcast (theCUBE Research): Discussed trends and innovation in observability, especially challenges introduced by high-cardinality SRE workloads and siloed telemetry data.
- Participation in developer AMAs, outlining technical and operational best practices for monitoring, DevOps, and scaling startups.
Product & Technical Vision
- Technical Differentiators:
- Focuses on observability not just at the server level, but at the service-level, aligning with the shift to microservice architectures.
- Platform is designed to automate and accelerate root-cause analysis in highly distributed systems, helping SRE teams reduce the time spent on monitoring from hours/days to minutes.
- Tools provide predictive, rather than reactive, reliability insights (change intelligence).
- Content Highlights:
- Modak’s published articles, including "Take Back Control of your Monitoring," "Why We Auto-Delete Slack Messages at Last9," and "Introducing Levitate: Uplift Your Metrics Management."
- Expert commentary on the challenges of scaling observability, managing SaaS costs, and modernizing data streaming infrastructure.
- Engaged in public discussions regarding AI’s impact on observability and operations.
- Community Engagement:
- Frequently interacts with the engineering and developer community through articles, podcasts, conference panels, and AMAs.
- Known for building developer tools and fostering best practices in modern operations—often frames engineering reliability in terms of "firefighting" critical issues.
Selected Skills & Interests
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
- High Cardinality Observability
- Cloud-native Systems and Microservices
- Software Development Best Practices
- AI and Automation in Ops
- Developer Advocacy & Community Engagement
- Loves building developer tools and is personally passionate about music (specifically The Beatles).
Key Insights for Engagement
- Modak is the strategic and technical founder leading a rapidly growing, venture-backed SaaS company at the forefront of observability and reliability for cloud-native architectures.
- Last9's product and scaling strategy reflect deep experience in SRE and direct pain points faced by large-scale digital platforms.
- As Modak continues to expand Last9’s presence, particularly in North America, he remains an ideal contact for discussions focused on modern observability, SRE challenges at scale, and innovation for high-velocity engineering teams.
LinkedIn: [Nishant Modak](http://www.linkedin.com/in/modak)
Company Website: [last9.io](https://last9.io/)
