In late 2013, Y Combinator-backed startup Errplane began developing an open source project called InfluxDB for database performance monitoring and alerting. After raising millions of dollars from VC firms like Mayfield Fund and Trinity Ventures, Errplane changed its name to his InfluxData and raised tens of millions of dollars more.
Years later, InfluxData still seems to be doing the right thing. The company announced late last week that it had raised $30 million in debt and his $51 million in a Series E equity round led by Princeville Capital and Citi Ventures, with participation from Battery Ventures, Mayfield and Sapphire Ventures. CEO Evan Kaplan told TechCrunch that the combined $81 million will go toward developing InfluxData’s new database engine, InfluxDB IOx, a dedicated cloud tier, and a new on-premises enterprise InfluxDB product built on top of InfluxDB IOx. said to be used.
When asked why InfluxData decided to secure the loan alongside the new shares, Kaplan said it was “customary” for the company “depending on market conditions and growth requirements.” Easier access to debt in the tech industry is also likely to play a role. According to his Venture-Monitor report for PitchBook, by the end of 2022, 2,188 deals raised him more than $29 billion, with tech debt deals surpassing his 2021 figure.
“The sheer volume of data that today’s applications, systems, and devices create makes real-time data analysis a huge challenge,” Kaplan said in an email. “InfluxDB allows developers to separate relevant signals from the ‘noise’ created by this vast amount of data. “
Platforms like InfluxData have become popular in the last few years as the demand for real-time data analysis tools grows. To date, he has raised over $100 million in capital for SingleStore, which provides a platform that enables businesses to consolidate, monitor and query data as a single entity. Imply, another real-time database vendor, closed a $100 million Series D round in May.
Kaplan says that databases built specifically for analyzing real-time data (also known as time-series data, or data recorded at regular time intervals) outperform the relational databases that enterprises typically use for their data workloads. claim to be. For example, relational databases have a defined schema, so changes such as adding or removing columns require a database migration, whereas time series databases tend to be “schemaless” and allow new fields to be added quickly. Easy to add.
“Within the time-series universe itself, the biggest challenge is managing high-cardinality data volumes: getting the right data, transforming it, and storing it in a way that makes it easy to extract value from it,” says Kaplan. said. “This is why a dedicated time series solution is important. It lowers the barrier to entry and streamlines the impact of time series data.”
According to Kaplan, InfluxData’s customers primarily rely on the company’s platform to access infrastructure, systems, apps, and customer data in real time, centralizing metrics, events, logs, and trace data across the organization. . Companies with physical assets also use InfluxData to collect sensor and device data, whether it originates from factories, manufacturing plants, smart devices, or satellites.
“InfluxDB accelerates the pace at which organizations derive value from their data,” asserts Kaplan. “IT teams using InfluxDB can query data as soon as it is written, as opposed to many other data warehouses that rely on batch ingestion and deferred processing before delivering insights. , measured in milliseconds.InfluxDB empowers businesses to collect and act on large amounts of data faster than ever before by delivering true real-time insights.”
In addition to the funding, the big news coming out of InfluxData is the aforementioned launch of InfluxDB IOx, announced last November. Kaplan explains that InfluxDB IOx “reimagines” his InfluxDB as a columnar real-time data service, giving users a time-series engine designed to ingest and analyze large volumes of fast data.
InfluxDB IOx expands the number and variety of use cases InfluxDB can handle, such as observability and distributed tracing, while supporting “the full range” of time-series data, Kaplan said. Additionally, the rebuilt engine adds his SQL language support for queries, bringing the ubiquitous data programming language to his InfluxDB for the first time.
“The InfluxDB IOx release significantly improves key benefits of the platform with the introduction of SQL support, the removal of cardinality restrictions, and up to 100x faster real-time queries,” continues Kaplan. “Customer interest in the new database engine is high and we are bullish on our product roadmap to bring InfluxDB IOx to more developers. metrics, logs, and traces), allowing you to compete more aggressively in Internet of Things, cloud observability, and other resource-intensive analytics settings.
TechCrunch cannot independently verify these performance claims. But on the customer side, InfluxData is objectively sound (assuming, of course, that the numbers Kaplan gave me are accurate) and he has over 1,900 commercial I have a customer.
Kaplan acknowledged that InfluxData faces increasing competition from AWS (see: Timestream), Microsoft Azure (Azure Data Explorer), and emerging open source vendors (Timescale, QuestDB). But he believes the rollout of InfluxDB IOx and a new funding round puts the company in a strong position.
“InfluxDB currently has 750,000 users deploying InfluxDB’s cloud service and 6,000 new users each month,” Kaplan added, adding that the company’s burn rate and annual recurring revenue were not disclosed. avoided. “Indicating our continued growth, InfluxData currently has approximately 165 employees and plans to grow its employee base by approximately 10% by the end of 2023.”
The closing of the Series E brings InfluxData’s total capital raised to $171 million.
