Grafana Labs receives US$220 million in Series C investment

Grafana Labs announced a $220 million Series C investment on Tuesday, bringing the company’s valuation to $3 billion, ten times its 2019 valuation.

This round of financing was led by Sequoia Capital, Coatue, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lead Edge Capital and GIC. As part of the latest round of financing, Sequoia Capital partner Carl Eschenbach will join the company’s board of directors with Coatue general partner David Schneider. Eschenbach is the former president of VMware, and Schneider was the president of ServiceNow.

Grafana Labs added a free tier in January and became the first open source provider to jointly develop with AWS and enter the market a month ago.

Due to the latest round of financing, Grafana Labs stated that it will add 50GB of tracking to 50GB of logs, 10,000 Prometheus indicator series, and 3 Grafana dashboard users with a “perpetual free tier.” Local Grafana Enterprise Stack and Grafana Cloud provide users with access to plugins such as Elasticsearch, Jira, Datadog, Splunk, Oracle, MongoDB, Snowflake, and ServiceNow.

Raj Dutt, CEO of Grafana Labs, said the company has achieved a number of successes this year, including the widespread adoption of Grafana Cloud and the introduction of Tempo 1.0 for tracking. The company also bought k6 and Pace.dev to add features to its platform.

“This new capital investment, and the joining of two experienced technology executives on our board, will allow us to focus on accelerating product development to support the success of our community and customers,” Dutt added.

Eschenbach pointed out that in just a few years, Grafana Labs has transformed from a single open source project to a project that is now heavily used in thousands of companies including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, eBay, PayPal, and Sony. He compared the company’s growth with that of VMware and said that the company already has nearly 500 employees in 40 different countries.

“At ServiceNow, I was able to witness firsthand how difficult it is to build an effective observability system that can provide the team with a single view of the entire organization,” Schneider explained.

“We believe that Grafana Labs and its supplier-neutral “big tent” concept makes it easier for organizations to keep a close eye on all systems through one dashboard.”