- Grafana Labs, the company known for open source projects like Grafana and Loki, announced it raised $24 million in funding recently
Grafana Labs — a company that is known for open source projects like Grafana and Loki — announced it raised $24 million in Series A funding recently. This round of funding was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and with participation from Lead Edge Capital.
With this round of funding, Grafana Labs will be further investing in the open-source community and it will accelerate the creation of an open and composable observability platform with Grafana at the front and center.
Grafana Labs also recently announced it named the following executive appointments: Douglas Hanna as COO, Dave Kranowitz as vice president of global sales, and Ryan McKinley as vice president of applications.
“Building on our community momentum, we’ll be pushing the boundaries further with an open and composable observability platform heading into 2020. This is an industry first that uses Grafana to bring together logs, metrics, and traces in a single, curated experience, enabling the deepest understanding of application behavior,” said Torkel Ödegaard, co-founder of Grafana Labs and creator of the Grafana project. “With today’s announcement, we’re staying true to our roots while reimagining what’s possible by accelerating our investments in both open-source projects and commercial products.”
Hanna was most recently the VP of Operations at Zendesk. And at Grafana Labs, he will oversee all go-to-market functions and internal operations.
Kranowitz had previously spent the last 10 years leading the sales teams at Turbonomic and Dynatrace.
At Grafana Labs, McKinley is going to be responsible for helping the community build solutions with Grafana beyond its traditional IT use cases.
“Grafana Labs has come a long way in five years, and continues to break traditional data silos,” explained Raj Dutt, co-founder and CEO of Grafana Labs. “We’re proud to have built a sustainable business and while we didn’t need to fundraise, we are excited to be able to further accelerate our investments in the global open source community and build the world’s first, truly open and composable observability platform. We’re also thrilled to have Doug, Dave, and Ryan on board to help realize our vision of a successful open source business.”
Grafana is known for helping teams understand and unify their disparate data no matter where it is based or the type of database that it is stored in. And this unique flexibility allows users to choose their preferred technologies and compose a perfect observability platform for their needs.
Plus Grafana Labs enables customers to get the most out of open source Grafana thus providing a superior experience while avoiding vendor lock-in and the spiraling costs of closed solutions.
“The open-source community has always embraced Grafana, while Grafana Labs is really only scratching the surface of what’s possible by building a next-generation, open and composable observability platform. This will be radically different than anything we’ve seen in the market to date. We are thrilled to be part of the journey and look forward to what’s on the horizon,” commented Gaurav Gupta, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Grafana Labs has become the focal point for a global community with millions of end-users and thousands of developers. And in addition to Grafana, the company has gone on to launch multiple successful open source projects such as Loki and Metrictank. And it also helps drive other significant projects, including Prometheus, Cortex, and Graphite.
“We’ve been using Grafana for years due to the easy pluggability, rich functionality and intuitive UI, and when we embraced Grafana Cloud, we were even more blown away. It has offered the speed, stability and scale we need in order to monitor our critical infrastructure. We’re excited to see what Grafana Labs has in store for the future,” noted
Alex Ulstein, Head of Monitoring at Wix.
Grafana Labs also offers Grafana Enterprise with key features and support for large organizations. And Grafana Labs also offers Grafana Cloud — which is a fully managed open and composable observability platform.
“Grafana is embedded into our engineering culture and day-to-day work. We track, graph and observe our systems with Grafana twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Grafana has had a huge impact on our business and the team at Grafana Labs are great partners,” noted Ariel Pisetzky, VP of Information Technology & Cyber at Taboola.
Now more than 500 customers, including Bloomberg, eBay, PayPal, and Sony work with Grafana Labs to help bring their disparate data sources together all through software that is vendor-neutral and open-source.
