New Relic is an anagram of its founder's name, Lew Cirne. Cirne had already built and sold one company that watched how software performed. He started New Relic to do the same job as a web service any developer could switch on. When it filed to go public in late 2014, apps had moved to the cloud, and teams needed to see inside code they no longer ran on their own servers.

Lew Cirne's Second Act

Lew Cirne founded Wily Technology, which CA bought in 2006. He started New Relic in 2008. The bet was that small teams would pay a monthly fee to see how their apps behaved in real time, with no big install. A developer added a few lines of code, and a dashboard showed slow pages, failed requests and database delays. New Relic sold to startups first and to large companies later.

From NEWR to Private

New Relic priced its IPO at $23 a share on December 11, 2014, above a raised range. The shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange the next day under NEWR and rose about 31 percent in early trading. Newer rivals such as Datadog grew faster in the years that followed. In November 2023 Francisco Partners and TPG completed a $6.5 billion deal to take New Relic private.

Cover: Lick Observatory, Mount Hamilton, California, Benjamin West Kilburn. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an observatory (watching what runs).