Grafana Labs raises $220 million in Series C investment round | ZDNet

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

The funding round was led by Sequoia Capital, Coatue, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lead Edge Capital and GIC. As part of the latest funding round Sequoia Capital partner Carl Eschenbach will join the company’s board alongside Coatue general partner David Schneider. Eschenbach is a former president of VMware and Schneider previously served as president of ServiceNow.

Grafana Labs added a free tier in January and a month earlier became the first open source provider to enter a joint development and go to market deal with AWS. 

Thanks to the latest funding round, Grafana Labs said it would be adding 50GB of traces to the 50GB of logs, 10,000 series of Prometheus metrics, and 3 Grafana dashboard users that come with the “free forever tier.” The on-premises Grafana Enterprise Stack as well as the Grafana Cloud offer users access to plugins like Elasticsearch, Jira, Datadog, Splunk, Oracle, MongoDB, Snowflake and ServiceNow.

Raj Dutt, CEO at Grafana Labs, said the company’s year had been marked by multiple successes, including widespread adoption of Grafana Cloud and the introduction of Tempo 1.0 for tracing. The company also purchased k6 and Pace.dev to add capabilities to their platforms. 

“This new investment of capital, as well as the addition of two highly experienced technology executives to our board, will focus us on accelerating product development to support our community’s and customers’ success,” Dutt added. 

Eschenbach noted that in only a few years, Grafana Labs has transformed itself from a single open source project to one now used heavily among thousands of companies like Bloomberg, JP Morgan Chase, eBay, PayPal, and Sony. He compared the company’s growth to that of VMware and said the company had expanded to almost 500 employees across 40 different countries. 

“At ServiceNow, I was able to witness first-hand how difficult it is to build an effective observability system that can provide teams with a single view across the organization,” Schneider explained. 

“We think that Grafana Labs and their vendor-neutral ‘big tent’ philosophy have made it easier for organizations to keep tabs on all of their systems from one single dashboard.”