InfluxData Inc., the maker of a specialized database used at companies such as SAP SE and Tesla Inc., today revealed that it has closed a $60 million funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners.

The investment doubles InfluxData’s total capital raised to $120 million. It represents a significant vote of confidence for the startup in a time when the segment of the database market where it operates is experiencing a surge in demand, as well as rising competition.

InfluxData offers a time-series database optimized for information that needs to be processed chronologically. Heat readings from an industrial sensor, for instance, must be arranged in the exact order of their creation to produce an accurate picture of how temperature levels fluctuate over time inside a piece of equipment. Such context is also necessary for application performance monitoring, tracking certain business metrics and a number of other use cases.

InfluxData provides a foundation on which companies can pursue projects in these areas. The system takes relatively little time to deploy and can perform upwards of millions of data operations per second, according to the startup.

“Sensors spit out metrics and events,” InfluxData Chief Executive Evan Kaplan (pictured) explained in a September interview on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE studio. “If you want to be performant in how you handle your instrumentation of the physical work and how you want to manage these systems, you use a time-series database.”

The startup distributes its core database under an open-source license together with three other tools that provide complementary features. One, dubbed Telegraf, handles the task of streaming data into InfluxDB from sensors and other sources, while another component called Chronograf lets companies visualize the information. The final component, Kapacitor, provides the ability to create automated workflows to act upon specific data.

“It can do everything from alerting to sending out another machine request to spinning up a new Kubernetes pod and to scaling the application,” Kaplan said.  “The way a developer or architect does it is they look at a complex application, or a complex set of sensors, they collect that data with Telegraf, they view it in real-time and then they build automation loops.”

InfluxData makes money from its software by selling two commercial versions with capabilities not found in the open-source edition. One is designed for use on a company’s own infrastructure, while the other is a cloud service that removes the need for administrators to manage the underlying hardware.

InfluxData will use the new funding to double down on the cloud market. The startup also plans to expand its sales and marketing operations with the goal of more aggressively targeting niche industries such as the financial sector.

InfluxData is embarking on this expansion just a few months after both Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google LLC introduced competing services for analyzing time-series data, which means the startup can likely expect more competition going forward. 

Photo: SiliconANGLE