Today, we are thrilled to announce Lux is leading Chronosphere’s $43.4 million Series B round alongside existing investors Greylock and Lee Fixel, with participation from General Atlantic.

We were fortunate to be investors in Chronosphere’s Series A in 2019, seeing it as one of the rare opportunities to partner with a peerless founding team tackling a problem they alone are uniquely suited to solve. Among many conversations over the past two years, spanning New York, Seattle, and San Francisco, it has become abundantly clear that the Chronosphere team has built a platform that speaks for itself — especially in light of the sheer magnitude of the unmet demand in the monitoring industry.

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion in the amount of data generated by enterprises. As a result, decabillion dollar infrastructure companies such as Snowflake have spawned, offering horizontally scalable technologies such data warehouses to keep up with the growing demands of modern cloud applications. However, monitoring tools — both open-source and commercial — have yet to see such innovation, with current solutions never having been designed for such scale.

Chronosphere founders Martin and Rob experienced first hand at Uber the limitations of the status quo in monitoring tools. Out of necessity, Uber was an early innovator in shifting to a cloud-native strategy and one of the first companies fraught with challenges in the transformation. The transition from CPU machines and VM’s to containers and Kubernetes as well as the evolution of the monolithic architecture to microservices meant the underlying infrastructure and requirements for monitoring became vastly different. Across its millions of users and drivers, Uber was generating billions of data points every second — how to store, keep track of, and analyze all that data in real-time? Expensive incumbent offerings were never made to handle the complex and dynamic nature of cloud-native environments and changing software architectures, and so Uber turned to Martin and Rob to architect a comprehensive monitoring solution internally.

During their time at Uber, Rob and Martin eventually built and scaled this solution, M3, into one of the largest production monitoring systems in the world, capable of storing tens of billions of metrics, ingesting and querying billions of data points per second, and serving hundreds of thousands of dashboards and alerts in real-time.The M3 platform (which was open sourced in 2016) was eventually adopted by other household brands such as Walmart, FedEx, Comcast, as well as other data-hungry companies. Rob and Martin’s unique experience building M3 thus became the foundation for Chronosphere, whose mission is to be the independent authority and provider of the next generation of cloud-native monitoring solutions — meeting the vast and growing demand of companies of all types that are quickly realizing the necessity of having a continuous, complete, and real-time picture of their businesses.

There is a massive technology shift happening in the enterprise today and the accelerated cloud transformation wrought by the pandemic has only hastened that evolution. The adoption of microservices and Kubernetes have paved the way for a new paradigm in monitoring. Chronosphere provides customers with a product developed from the ground up to provide visibility up and down the stack, from infrastructure to applications, to monitor both static and ephemeral workloads, removing data silos, and ending overages.

When we invested in Chronosphere’s Series A, we believed companies outside of Uber would face a similar need for a scalable, reliable and customizable Monitoring-as-a-Service platform purpose-built for cloud-native applications. Today, it’s no longer a belief: Chronosphere’s numerous and varied customers are the largest validation of its product. Many of the largest and fastest growing companies in the world now depend on Chronosphere to monitor their mission-critical workloads. The company’s rapidly expanding customer base represents $100 billion+ in enterprise value publicly-traded companies to high-growth startups and spanning industries such as financial services, retail, consumer, and enterprise software.

And this is just the beginning. We are beyond excited for the Chronosphere team and look forward to partnering with them for many years to come.

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