Grafana Labs Receives $24M Series A

The round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and with participation from Lead Edge Capital, will be used to further invest in the open source community and accelerate the creation of an open and composable observability platform with Grafana at the center. The company also announced new executive appointments including Douglas Hanna, chief operating officer, Dave Kranowitz, vice president of global sales, and Ryan McKinley, vice president of applications.

"Building on our community momentum, we'll be pushing the boundaries further with an open and composable observability platform heading into 2020. This is an industry first that uses Grafana to bring together logs, metrics and traces in a single, curated experience, enabling the deepest understanding of application behavior," said Torkel Odegaard, co-founder of Grafana Labs and creator of the Grafana project. "With today's announcement, we're staying true to our roots while reimagining what's possible by accelerating our investments in both open source projects and commercial products."

Douglas Hanna joins Grafana Labs as COO after most recently serving as VP, Operations at Zendesk. At Grafana Labs, he will be responsible for all go-to-market functions and internal operations.

Dave Kranowitz joins Grafana Labs as VP, Global Sales after spending the last ten years leading sales teams at Turbonomic and Dynatrace.

Ryan McKinley, the leading community contributor to Grafana, joins Grafana Labs as VP of applications, responsible for helping the community build solutions with Grafana that go beyond its traditional IT use cases.

Grafana Labs: Putting Open Source Principles First
Trusted and loved by the community, Grafana helps teams understand and unify their disparate data, no matter where it lives or what kind of database it's stored in. This unique flexibility allows users to choose their preferred technologies and compose a perfect observability platform for their needs. Grafana Labs helps customers get the most out of open source Grafana, providing the best possible experience while avoiding vendor lock-in and the spiraling costs of closed solutions.

Grafana Labs has become the center of a vibrant global community with millions of end users and thousands of developers. In addition to Grafana, the company has gone on to launch multiple successful open source projects, including Loki and Metrictank, and helps drive other significant projects, including Prometheus, Cortex and Graphite.

Grafana Labs offers Grafana Enterprise, with key features and support for large organizations, and Grafana Cloud, a fully managed open and composable observability platform. Today, more than 500 customers including Bloomberg, eBay, PayPal and Sony turn to Grafana Labs to help bring their disparate data sources together, all through software that is vendor neutral and open source.

"Grafana Labs has come a long way in five years, and continues to break traditional data silos," said Raj Dutt, co-founder and CEO of Grafana Labs. "We're proud to have built a sustainable business and while we didn't need to fundraise, we are excited to be able to further accelerate our investments in the global open source community and build the world's first, truly open and composable observability platform. We're also thrilled to have Doug, Dave and Ryan on board to help realize our vision of a successful open source business."

Supporting Quotes
"The open source community has always embraced Grafana, while Grafana Labs is really only scratching the surface of what's possible by building a next-generation, open and composable observability platform. This will be radically different than anything we've seen in the market to date. We are thrilled to be part of the journey and look forward to what's on the horizon."
– Gaurav Gupta, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners

"We've been using Grafana for years due to the easy pluggability, rich functionality and intuitive UI, and when we embraced Grafana Cloud, we were even more blown away. It has offered the speed, stability and scale we need in order to monitor our critical infrastructure. We're excited to see what Grafana Labs has in store for the future."
– Alex Ulstein, Head of Monitoring, Wix

"Grafana is embedded into our engineering culture and day-to-day work. We track, graph and observe our systems with Grafana twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Grafana has had a huge impact on our business and the team at Grafana Labs are great partners."
– Ariel Pisetzky, VP Information Technology & Cyber, Taboola

About Grafana Labs
Grafana Labs is the company behind leading open source projects Grafana and Loki, and the creator of the first open and composable observability platform. The company offers Grafana Enterprise, with key features and support for large organizations, and Grafana Cloud, the official managed hosted Grafana stack. A remote-first company, Grafana Labs has a globally distributed team and is backed by leading investors Lead Edge Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Follow Grafana on Twitter at @grafana or visit www.grafana.com.

About Lightspeed Venture Partners
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise and Consumer sectors. Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped build more than 350 companies globally, including Snap, Nest, Nutanix, AppDynamics, MuleSoft, OYO, Pinduoduo, Guardant, StitchFix, and GrubHub. Lightspeed currently manages $7.9B across the global Lightspeed platform, with investment professionals and advisors in Silicon Valley, Israel, India, and China.