Log data analytics platform company ChaosSearch Inc. said today it has closed on a $40 million round of funding.

New York-based growth equity firm Stripes and Moore Strategic Ventures led the Series B round, which brings the company’s total amount raised to more than $59 million. Stripes partner Ron Shah is joining the board.

ChaosSearch emerged back in January 2017 touting its a secure, scalable log analysis platform that’s hosted in a multitenant or dedicated software-as-a-service environment, using an Amazon S3 as a hot data store.

ChaosSearch positions its platform as an alternative to what’s called the ELK stack, which refers to a complex stack of the Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana open-source projects. Companies use the ELK stack to aggregate logs from all of their systems and applications, then analyze those logs to help with tasks such as application and infrastructure monitoring, troubleshooting and security analytics.

The company argues that the ELK Stack and similar tools sold by companies such as Splunk Inc. and New Relic Inc. have limitations when it comes to scalability, and that this forces companies to break up data into multiple clusters to analyze it properly.

The ChaosSearch Data Platform connects and indexes data within a client’s Amazon Web Services Inc. S3 or Glacier accounts. By doing so, it bypasses the complex data pipelines required by other log data analysis platforms, indexing data in situ without the need to transform it first. It makes the data fully searchable and available for analysis within the existing data store, helping customers save on time, complexity and costs.

What’s most interesting is that the ChaosSearch platform actually uses the ELK Stack tools itself, though it abstracts away the complexity. Walsh said the company essentially uses advanced math to achieve greater scalability, rather than just throwing more hardware at the problem.

“What your data analysts use does not change,” ChaosSearch Chief Executive Ed Walsh (pictured) told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “But you get a much more scalable environment. You get a hot analytic data lake.”

The new round of funding comes at a time of rapid growth for ChaosSearch, which saw its sales revenue grow by triple digits in the last year, though on an undisclosed base, as it expanded its customer base in the U.S. and in Europe. Walsh said that growth demonstrates the enormous appetite enterprises have for a more scalable log data analytics platform.

“We have validated the market fit, and the demand’s high,” Walsh said.

Moving forward, Walsh told SiliconANGLE that the company intends to use the Series B funding to build out the company’s product and expand its sales and marketing teams. He said that although the ChaosSearch is primarily competing against Elasticsearch, Splunk and New Relic, it also has designs on other kinds of data such as Structured Query Language queries that would enable customers to use data visualization platforms such as Tableau Software and Looker to be used with its platform, as well as on machine learning data. ChaosSearch plans to add support for Google Cloud in February, followed by Microsoft Azure in the middle of next year, he said.

Wikibon analyst Dave Vellante told SiliconANGLE the log analytics market is evolving rapidly. He said Splunk first emerged as the “Google of logs” around a decade ago, only for its dominance to be challenged by the rise of the ELK stack. And now, he said, new cloud-based technologies such as ChaosSearch’s platform are emerging that greatly simplify the process of managing log files.

“ChaosSearch has been a quiet player that has developed some unique IP to eliminate the complexities around scaling the ELK stack and is trying to lower costs by a factor of five times,” Vellante said. “This new funding round will help the company promote its successes, hone its go-to-market and compete with the big players.”

Walsh appeared on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent event earlier this month and talked more about his plans to take on the ELK stack:

With reporting from Robert Hof and Dave Vellante.

Photo: SiliconANGLE