Fundraising, exiting to Elastic and the future of Product Engineering | Rasmus Makwarth (CEO, Bucket)
Bucket founder Rasmus Makwarth gives an unusually candid account of fundraising under pressure, the surprise path that sold Opbeat to Elastic, and what an acquisition taught him about enterprise software and product engineering.
Rasmus Makwarth sold application-performance monitoring startup Opbeat to Elastic in 2017, where it became Elastic APM and part of Elastic Observability. He later founded Bucket, a B2B feature-flagging and product-engineering company.
We discuss low-ACV fundraising, the value of showing up, negotiating an acquisition while another term sheet was closing, life inside a much larger DevTools company, and why engineers should stay close to customer response after a feature ships.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at jack@scalingdevtools.com.
What did Opbeat build?
Opbeat connected application errors and performance regressions to changes in Git, helping a team see what changed and who knew that part of the code. The goal was not blame; it was eliminating the tedious work of reconstructing why a problem began so developers could fix it quickly.
Why was Opbeat strategically useful to Elastic?
Elastic was strong in logs and server metrics but lacked visibility inside application performance. Observability was bringing those signals together, while Elastic also wanted a more turnkey cloud product. Opbeat supplied both an application layer and a team experienced in operating a SaaS experience.
Why did the next funding round become so difficult?
Early rounds came together quickly around prominent angels, which made us underestimate the next process. We had many small customers but no large accounts proving an enterprise trajectory, so investors struggled to build a venture-scale case. I eventually bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco and decided not to return without a term sheet.
How did a casual coffee become an acquisition offer?
During the fundraising sprint I accepted a vague meeting with Elastic's business-development lead even though it felt low priority. A VC who had declined our round had apparently told Elastic the product was worth seeing. That meeting led to a conversation with founder Shay Banon and, just as our financing documents neared completion, a direct acquisition proposal.
What made the negotiation so stressful?
We risked damaging a nearly completed funding round without knowing whether Elastic was serious or speaking to several companies. The signed term-sheet path gave us a credible alternative and negotiating leverage, but time was short. Elastic moved quickly, the team received a good outcome and almost everyone stayed for years — yet it never felt inevitable while it was happening.
Do founders still need to fundraise in San Francisco?
Most pitches can now happen credibly over video, and strong European funds offer real alternatives. You should still meet the investors before committing because they may sit on your board for a decade. Fit does not require friendship, but it does require trust and the ability to talk honestly when things go badly — while remembering that survival sometimes limits your choice.
What was hard about joining Elastic?
We had sweated over a polished product experience and suddenly had to integrate with a UI that, at the time, felt slower and less refined. That was emotionally difficult. The upside was extraordinary reach: major enterprises used the product at a scale Opbeat could not have reached alone.
What did you learn inside a thousand-person DevTools company?
I learned enterprise sales, cross-functional leadership and how an organization integrates enormous hiring volume. Opbeat became Elastic APM and then Elastic Observability, giving me responsibility at a completely different scale. The experience worked particularly well because Elastic remained technical and product-led under a founder who had built the original project.
What does Bucket mean by product engineering?
A feature flag turns a feature into a structured object: who can access it, which B2B accounts adopted it, whether use regressed and how customers feel. Engineers and designers are excellent problem solvers, but organizations often separate them from the post-launch evidence. Bucket aims to return that feedback while the feature context is still fresh.
Links & references
- Rasmus Makwarth on LinkedIn ↗
- Rasmus Makwarth on X ↗
- Bucket ↗
- Elastic ↗
- Opbeat acquisition announcement ↗
- Shay Banon on LinkedIn ↗
- Gregory Tademoto on LinkedIn ↗
This episode is brought to you by Enterprise Ready Conf from WorkOS.