Roee Adler

What is the most significant initiative you have led recently?
Going public with Hud. For two and a half years, we built Hud quietly, working with our first customers, who agreed to run our product in their production environments and give us honest feedback about what wasn't working. In December 2025, we went public with a $21 million funding round, already working with companies such as monday.com, Drata, and Lemonade.

Since then, my main focus has been building the company around the product: marketing, sales, and engineers working directly with customers. I've been through this stage several times in my career, and it is always exciting and never gets easier. With the AI revolution accelerating everything, the pace is much faster and the excitement is even greater. 

What do you consider the company's key strengths?
Our primary strength is the depth of our technology, and Mai deserves the credit for that. She comes from the field of vulnerability research, where you learn to move through a system without anyone noticing. She applied that approach to a problem the observability industry had nearly given up on: seeing every function in the code in a production environment, without sampling or slowing down the system.
We built the team around this technical depth, and I think our team is simply amazing. They are smart people who love building and exploring, and we genuinely enjoy working together.
And then there are our customers: companies at the forefront of technology that are partnering with us to build the future.

What key initiatives have been undertaken recently to strengthen the company in the coming years?
Over the past year, we realized that our greatest value lies not only in what happens after a problem occurs, but throughout the entire process of moving code changes into production. Today, Hud checks changes before they are deployed, monitors them as they go live, and, if something breaks, provides the coding agent with the information it needs to fix the problem.

We also made a deliberate choice not to become just another dashboard that someone has to remember to open. Hud integrates directly with Cursor, Claude Code, and AWS Kiro, bringing insights to where the code is written. At the same time, we have established partnerships with AWS and ClickHouse, integrating us into the environments our customers already use. 

What are the company's main challenges in the coming years?
The AI revolution is reshaping the software industry. When the dust settles, we will be left with a new landscape of industry categories. We are building one of them: the connection between AI agents and the environments in which the code they generate runs.
The challenge is to stay ahead of the market, move quickly, anticipate where the biggest problems will emerge, and be there with excellent products to solve them.
At the same time, we must preserve our distinctive culture of openness, transparency, and hard work. 

What advice would you give to a manager at the beginning of their career?
First, understand that management is never easy, even for experienced managers, and that you can never rest on your laurels. The moment you solve one problem, there is no time to relax, because the next challenge is already on its way.
Stay close to the details. You can delegate execution, planning, and even management, but you cannot delegate understanding. If you don't deeply understand how a part of the company works, it probably isn't working well. In particular, speak to customers yourself, even when you have a team dedicated to doing so. Nothing replaces hearing directly from someone what is causing them pain.
Hire exceptional people and let them do their work. I've been part of eight startups, and what distinguished the successful ones from the unsuccessful ones was almost always the people. 

What is important to remember during difficult times?
My dream and driving force are to continue building products and technologies that solve people's problems. I consider it an enormous privilege to work in a field I love so much, because so many people never get that opportunity.
I've failed many times, and things often haven't gone the way I wanted. But I always kept moving forward, because as long as the world allows me to keep building, I'm happy. In the end, every crisis has led to something bigger and better. I genuinely believe that every failure is a step on the road to success, and that ultimately, those who keep moving forward succeed. 
At the same time, it is essential to be open and transparent about what isn't working, because otherwise, you cannot understand the problem or fix it.