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January 10, 2023

Chronosphere Nabs $115M in Extended Series C

(Source: Chronosphere)

Cloud observability firm Chronosphere has announced an extended Series C round of $115 million, increasing its valuation to $1.6 billion.

The fresh funds will support the marketing and development of its cloud native observability platform, according to a Chronosphere release. The company noted it had tripled its ARR and headcount while attaining greater than 145% net revenue retention, as well as 100% of its customers. Chronosphere boasts enterprise customers such as DoorDash, Zillow, and Visa.

“Chronosphere’s game-changing platform gives us the visibility and control to manage our observability data, especially with our unprecedented growth,” said Ryan Sokol, VP of Engineering at DoorDash.

Cloud observability platforms are becoming popular for their cost-saving and infrastructure optimization abilities. These solutions obtain stats in the form of metrics, logs, and traces for increasingly-complex systems in real time, which can aid organizations in understanding the health of their data and systems. Cloud observability software can also help pinpoint the reasons for cost increases by identifying patterns and analyzing resource usage and performance over time. Chronosphere says its platform enables customers to transform their data based on the need, context, and utility to optimize costs, improve user experience, and solve problems faster. The company also claims its average customer optimizes their data set by 48%.

Chronosphere’s platform sends cloud monitoring metrics alerts. (Source: Chronosphere)

Chronosphere co-founders, CEO Martin Mao and CTO Rob Skillington, began their journey at Uber. They, along with a team of engineers, developed a metrics engine, M3, that was built to scale the data storage and query serving of the Prometheus monitoring platform that Uber had previously adopted. According to the Chronosphere website, M3 was developed in open source from the beginning in order to help the broader community and is the basis for Chronosphere’s platform.

The Chronosphere observability platform has features not found in M3, including administrative access controls that regulate the amount of data processed, allowing admins to limit infrastructure costs. It is also delivered as a managed service with no manual maintenance required.

The company recently released a study conducted by Forrester that examined cost savings and benefits of using Chronosphere, finding that customers returned an average of $7.9 million in benefits over three years. The report also asserts that in the same timeframe, companies on average also saw $4.9 million in cost savings for 165% return on investment, with an average payback period of less than six months.

Chronosphere co-founders. (Source: Chronosphere)

Chronosphere previously raised $200 million Series C in October 2021. Today’s extended round brings Chronosphere’s total funding to $343 million. New investors include GV and Geodesic Capital, with participation from existing investors Addition, Founders Fund, General Atlantic, Greylock, Glynn Capital, and Lux Capital.

“In a cloud native world where businesses are looking for both efficiency and effectiveness, there’s a dire need for organizations to get observability right,” said Sangeen Zeb, Partner at GV. “Chronosphere has cracked the code to tame the data deluge in complex environments and provides better tools that quickly sift through the most meaningful data for better customer experiences and business outcomes.”

“This funding underscores the crucial market need for powerful cloud native observability solutions to generate positive business outcomes–especially critical now as companies seek more efficient and effective ways to improve customer experiences,” said CEO Mao. “We plan to use this latest investment to bring our forward-looking observability solution to the broader market as we continue to disrupt legacy solutions that provide too little, too late for too much cost.”

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