Honeycomb – a leading observability platform used by high-performing engineering teams for investigating the behavior of cloud applications – announced it has raised $50 million in Series D funding. Headline led the round with participation from other existing investors, Insight Partners, and Scale Venture Partners. This funding round brings the total capital raised to nearly $150 million, including customer angel investments from HelloFresh CEO Dominik Richter and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch.
This new funding round adds to the company’s momentum last year when it achieved another consecutive year of 2x revenue growth and drove over 160% net revenue retention for over 600 customers globally. And Honeycomb also released its O’Reilly Book “Observability Engineering” and was named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for APM and Observability.
Along with this momentum, Honeycomb also cited recent key customer wins such as Robinhood, Moov, Frasers Group, and Equinix, who all join a growing list of customers like Vanguard, Slack, and Vercel. Plus Kelly Watkins, former VP of Global Marketing at Slack and CEO of Abstract, has joined the Board of Directors.
As organizations are facing turbulent economic headwinds, engineering teams are expected to do more with less. And the unprecedented pressure to innovate and release new features faster is compounded by stringent end-user expectations and increasingly complex tech stacks.
So modern engineering teams can no longer rely on “good enough” legacy APM tools built for predictable and monolithic systems and aren’t architected for the complex and unpredictable distributed cloud environments. Plus Honeycomb is the only observability platform to entirely sidestep the data correlation problem across logs, metrics, and traces, by uniquely architecting its datastore to be datatype agnostic.
How code is written and intended to be used often differs from reality nowadays. And end-users have varied environments and dynamic use cases for software, creating unpredictable bugs and anomalies. The ability to analyze high-cardinality data is crucial for discovering novel problems.
Honeycomb essentially gives engineering teams the power to detect patterns in seconds across billions of data points representing how users are experiencing their code in real-time. And it never aggregates or discards data.
The funding will be used for propelling Honeycomb’s expansion across geographies, its contributions and significant support for OpenTelemetry, and efforts toward building a cohesive integration strategy across the entire software development ecosystem.
KEY QUOTES:
“Delivering effective observability is now a strategic imperative for software teams in all industry sectors. Honeycomb created the category by relentlessly focusing on establishing a better model and platform for managing and troubleshooting modern distributed systems, by engineers, for engineers.”
— James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk
“High-performance engineering teams need accessible, intuitive observability workflows. While our competition is busy rearchitecting their data stores, we’re once again leading the pack by delivering innovative, developer-centric features that scale the power of knowledge across teams. Too often, a prospect using a traditional APM tool comes through our door after being slapped with surprise overage bills or frustrations regarding incident visibility. Organizations should never be subjected to gaps in visibility just to save on cost—Honeycomb makes good on that promise.”
— Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb
“Software is the genetic makeup of our modern global society. We rely on it for everything—so if your apps and services aren’t performing how they were intended to, users will leave them to find ones that work. This makes the mission and value that Honeycomb’s observability platform provides to engineering teams business-critical, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to help them scale to win big on a global level.”
— Thomas Gieselmann, Founding Partner at Headline
