Neebula - Startup to Acquisition

The Story of Neebula: From Startup to Strategic Acquisition

This week, I’ve been looking into the story of Neebula Systems, a company founded by Yuval Cohen, Ariel Gordon, and Shai Mohaban. Their central idea was simple but powerful: what if infrastructure wasn’t viewed in terms of servers and applications, but rather by the business services those systems actually deliver?

They called their product ServiceWatch, and it offered a top-down perspective of an organization’s environment. Rather than managing raw infrastructure, ServiceWatch created dynamic service maps, automatically updated as configurations changed. This gave IT teams a clear view of how different components supported business services and allowed them to understand the real impact when something went wrong.

Neebula didn’t raise an enormous amount of money, just $5 million. That’s still a significant sum, but in startup terms, especially for a team that grew to 35 people, it wasn’t extravagant. What they did raise, they used wisely. They built a focused, high-value product in a short amount of time and proved its worth quickly.

ServiceNow took notice. Just four years after Neebula was founded, ServiceNow acquired the company for $100 million, an impressive 20x return on the initial investment. After the acquisition, the founders went on to work at ServiceNow, with Yuval Cohen eventually serving as VP and CISO. They later moved on to explore other opportunities as angel investors and advisors.

If you’ve worked with ServiceNow, you might recognize the legacy of ServiceWatch. It became the foundation of ServiceNow’s Service Mapping capability. What ServiceWatch introduced was a shift from managing infrastructure to managing services, a forward-thinking model that’s now central to modern IT operations.

Some tools fade after acquisition. Others become part of the foundation.
The difference? Execution, timing, and a willingness to keep going.

Stuff I’m Taking From This

1. Be early, but useful
   Neebula wasn’t just ahead of its time with service modeling—they made it deployable. That combo matters. Vision without usability is just a pitch.

2. Your users are your leverage
   They didn’t wait for a market to form. They helped shape one by solving a real ops pain. That clarity attracts the right early adopters.

3. M&A isn't the end—it's a fork
   The Neebula team could’ve bounced after the sale. Instead, they helped re-architect what became the CMDB for one of the biggest IT platforms in the world. That’s impact.

If you're building something in that same spirit. Early, useful, and bold. I’d love to swap notes.
https://meetings.hubspot.com/jace-benson