Grafana Labs: $250 Million In ARR And $6 Billion Valuation

By Amit Chowdhry • Aug 29, 2024

Grafana Labs, a company that has created some of the ubiquitous, open, and composable operational dashboards, announced the successful completion of a primary and secondary transaction totaling about $270 million in proceeds to the company and certain of its stockholders. The company also announced additional growth milestones that solidified its position as a leader in the observability industry.

The deal—an extension of its Series D financing at a valuation of over $6 billion—was led by existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from all existing institutional investors, including GIC, Sequoia Capital, Coatue, Lead Edge Capital, J.P. Morgan, and K5 Global. Additionally, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, CapitalG, joined as a new investor. The funding will accelerate Grafana Labs’ product development, enabling the company to strengthen its market leadership while strategically pursuing future M&A opportunities.

In the past year, Grafana Cloud introduced a range of new solutions that make it faster and easier to get up and running with observability, including application and frontend observability. And customers have been saving time, reducing toil, and cutting costs with new AI/ML features such as Adaptive Metrics, which lowers bills by identifying and eliminating unused metrics through aggregation. These enhancements have significantly contributed to its rapid adoption, with Grafana Cloud now growing twice as fast as the self-managed version.

As the observability industry is expected to experience significant growth in the coming years due to the increasing adoption of cloud-native technologies, more and more organizations are turning to Grafana Labs to help them manage the growing complexities of their infrastructure. And the company has increased the number of paying customers in the past year to over 5,000. Customers span various industries and sectors, including companies like Citigroup, Salesforce, Dell Technologies, ASOS, and Microsoft.

The new customer growth has also propelled Grafana Labs well beyond $250 million in ARR. And the achievement not only cements Grafana Labs’ position as a key player in the industry but also sets a strong foundation for continued growth and innovation in the years to come.

KEY QUOTES:

“When Lightspeed first invested in Grafana Labs’ Series A in 2019, we were confident in the company’s strategy. We knew that open source companies were rewriting the narrative, transitioning from merely free alternatives to releasing technology that rivals or surpasses proprietary solutions. Grafana exemplifies this shift—there’s nothing that compares to their capabilities in operational dashboarding. They’ve been on a tear releasing so many new products and building what clearly is the strongest open source observability platform in the market. Seeing the company exceed 5,000 paying customers and consistently deliver groundbreaking solutions for both open source and enterprise users is a testament to their vision and execution.”

  • Gaurav Gupta, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners

“We’re grateful for the support from new and existing investors reinforcing their commitment to Grafana Labs during an uncertain market – we see this transaction and valuation as strong third-party validation of not just our trajectory, but also the opportunity at hand. I’m incredibly proud that we have stayed true to our roots over the past decade with open source at the heart of what we do at Grafana Labs, and we are committed to fostering a thriving ecosystem where innovation and collaboration flourish.”

“We’ve accomplished so much in the almost ten years since Grafana Labs was established. The open-source side project my co-founder Torkel Ödegaard created now has 20 million users worldwide and has become the foundation of a sustainable business and market leader in observability. Beyond the impressive numbers, what I’m most proud of is that we have stayed true to our roots, while diversifying our revenue sources. We believe with the right strategy, open source will win and we’re just getting started.”

  • Grafana Labs CEO and co-founder Raj Dutt