Grafana Labs Brings In $50M Series B For Open-Source Developer Platform

Grafana Labs aims to provide a better way to develop software and has closed on a $50 million round of Series B funding to get closer to its goal.

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Led by existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, the oversubscribed round also included additional funding from another existing backer, Lead Edge Capital.

Including the new investment, New York-based Grafana has raised a total of $75.2 million since 2015, which includes the company’s October 2019 Series A round, where it secured $24 million, according to Crunchbase data. Both Lightspeed and Lead Edge also invested in that round.

Grafana Labs works with organizations using its Grafana open-source software platform for visualizing their metrics, logs and traces data, wherever it lives. In addition to the open source platform, the company has two commercial products, Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud.

Growth

After raising its Series A, Grafana focused on building out its sales and marketing teams— which included some strategic hires such as Doug Hanna as COO—Raj Dutt, co-founder and CEO of Grafana Labs, told Crunchbase News.

The remote-first company now has more than 170 employees in 32 countries.

The new funding will be used to scale the company, Dutt said.

In addition, Grafana created the Grafana Accelerator Program to offer grants, equity financing and developer access for early-stage companies, and side projects developing in the wider Grafana ecosystem.

“We want to dramatically accelerate in research and development and hire a lot of engineers,” Dutt said.

There are now more than 550,000 active installations of Grafana, and the company has more than 1,000 customers. The company will add capabilities to both of its commercial offerings, Dutt said.

“We will focus on product innovation and nurturing and growing the community,” he added. “We will spend most of our efforts on developing the open-source software and building out capabilities with the metrics, logs and traces.”

Market context

Open-source software continues to gain traction. Three years ago, we went more in-depth on the subject, noting that in the first quarter of 2017 alone, more than $371 million was invested in 13 U.S. dollar-denominated deals.

The open-source services industry is already being contributed to by more than 30 million developers and is expected to reach nearly $33 billion in value by 2022, according to CB Insights’ Market Sizing tool.

Heavy hitters in the space include GitLab and GitHub, which was acquired by Microsoft. We’ve also reported on several other startups in the past three months that received funding for their work in the sector, including:

Abacus.AI, open sourcing an artificial intelligence tool for customers who don’t have a data science or AI team. It closed on a $13 million Series A funding.
Berlin-born conversational artificial intelligence startup Rasa secured $26 million in Series B funding.
Enterprise open-source database platform MariaDB landed $25 million in new funding.
Streamlit’s open-source app framework raised a $21 million Series A round of funding.
Yugabyte secured $30 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding for YugabyteDB, an open-source distributed Structured Query Language database.
Almanac, a cloud-based platform for professionals to create, collaborate and share open-source work documents, announced a $9 million seed round of funding.