The people
What they build
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On the TechTO stage
There Are No Referees in Capitalism
Watch on YouTube ↗CS as a Revenue Driver: Building a Unified Customer Data Stack | Jason Myers, Rootly
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About
Rootly started as a side project inside Instacart, where co-founder Quentin Rousseau was the company's first site reliability engineer and JJ Tang ran enterprise business. The internal tool they built to manage incidents worked well enough that friends at other companies offered to pay for it, and in 2020 they spun it out as Rootly, going through Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch. The platform handles the full incident lifecycle: alerts route to the right on-call engineer, incidents spin up as structured Slack or Microsoft Teams channels with automated comms and timelines, and retrospectives and status pages generate from the record. Its newer AI SRE product starts investigating the moment an alert fires, checking code changes, telemetry, and past incidents in parallel to surface a probable root cause. The company is known for its scrappy go-to-market: with a two-person team, Tang and Rousseau answered Canva's support Slack in two-hour shifts around the clock for over a year to win the account, which snowballed into Grammarly, Rivian, and Tripadvisor. Tang, who was Ada's first employee before Instacart, is based in Toronto, where Rootly's office sits next to PagerDuty's; he told the story of renting the elevator ad screens in PagerDuty's building at TechTO in May 2026. As of mid-2026 the company describes itself as Toronto-headquartered with over 100 employees, and Canadian customers include Wealthsimple.
Backers
Y Combinator (S21), Renegade Partners (led the US$12M Series A), Google's Gradient Ventures, XYZ Venture Capital, and 8VC, plus angels including Instacart co-founder Max Mullen.
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Quick answers
What does Rootly do?
Rootly is an AI-native on-call and incident management platform. When something breaks, it pages the right engineer, spins up a structured incident channel in Slack or Microsoft Teams, automates communications and timelines, and generates retrospectives and status pages. Its AI SRE product investigates alerts as they fire, checking code changes, telemetry, and past incidents to suggest a root cause.
Who founded Rootly?
JJ Tang and Quentin Rousseau, who met at Instacart, where Rousseau was the first site reliability engineer and Tang ran enterprise business. They built Rootly as an internal Instacart tool before spinning it out in 2020 and going through Y Combinator (S21). Tang, previously Ada's first employee, is based in Toronto.
What is Rootly's Toronto connection?
Tang describes Rootly as Toronto-headquartered with over 100 employees, and its Toronto office sits next to competitor PagerDuty's. After spotting ad screens in PagerDuty's elevator, Tang rented them for two and a half years, timed to PagerDuty's lease, to run Rootly hiring ads and a quarterly-updated carousel of logos that had churned off PagerDuty. Canadian customers include Wealthsimple.