Three former Amazon engineers built PagerDuty because they were tired of being woken up the wrong way. At Amazon they had carried pagers for on-call shifts, and the tools for it were clumsy. By 2019, nearly every business ran on software, and every minute of downtime cost money. PagerDuty listened to a company's monitoring tools and called, texted, or pinged the right person when something failed. It filed to go public in a busy spring for software IPOs.

Waterloo Grads on Call

Alex Solomon, Andrew Miklas, and Baskar Puvanathasan studied at the University of Waterloo and worked together at Amazon. In 2009 they started PagerDuty in Toronto, then moved it to San Francisco. The product began as a simple scheduler that knew who was on call and kept trying until someone answered. It grew into a platform for managing incidents. Teams paid a monthly fee per user.

A Fifty-Nine Percent Jump

PagerDuty priced its IPO at $24 a share on April 10, 2019, above a range it had already raised. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange as PD the next day and closed up 59 percent. Growth later slowed. The company explored a sale, and in August 2026 it cut about 15 percent of its staff. PagerDuty still trades on the NYSE as PD.

Cover: Eight Bells, Winslow Homer. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for sailors on watch (eight bells, the change of shift).