BigPanda Transforms Into A Unicorn After $190M Raise

San Francisco-based BigPanda, which helps IT departments keep their digital services running, hit a valuation of $1.2 billion after a $190 million raise that mints the company as one of the first unicorns of 2022.

The new round was led by Advent International and Insight Partners, with participation by other existing investors. Founded in 2012, the company has raised more than $310 million, according to Crunchbase data.

BigPanda competes in what it calls the “AIOps market.” With its AI-enhanced platform, companies can automate incident management tasks and prevent IT outages—something that has become crucial as businesses have increased their digital services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“COVID has made digital services even more important,” said co-founder and CEO Assaf Resnick. “It turbocharged the digital economy.”

Along with the pandemic increasing demand for additional IT infrastructure enhancements, Resnick said further cloud adoption by businesses and less skepticism around AI has helped drive the company to a new stage of growth. Last year, net new ARR grew by 155 percent year to year, helping the company realize the time is right to raise money and double down on the growing market.

Complexity brings opportunity

Eric Noeth, a partner at Advent, said he had been following BigPanda for a long time and called the company “unique,” for its ability to help IT departments cope with the growing scale and complexity that hybrid cloud infrastructure setups have brought to enterprises.

“Everything is becoming much more difficult,” he said. “You can’t just hire people quickly enough. … AIOps is a solution to that problem.”

Solving those complexity issues helps differentiate BigPanda from others in the IT operations market, Resnick said. While sometimes compared to observability platforms like Splunk, Resnick said BigPanda combines areas such as observability, incident management, monitoring and more—something no other platform in the space does.

The 300-person company anticipates using the new funding to expand its go-to-market efforts—likely moving into new geographies—as well as for continued product development and even possible strategic acquisitions, Resnick said.

While the company has had “plenty of opportunities” to sell to strategics in the past, Resnick said he sees BigPanda as “a long-term, very large, sustainable company.”

That idea is something BigPanda’s investors seem to agree on.

“It’s a special company,” Noeth said. “It should be a massive company in a massive market.”

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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