Chronosphere Inc., a startup working to make complex information technology environments easier to monitor, today announced that it has raised a $43.4 million funding round from a group of prominent investors.

Greylock Partners co-led the round with Lux Capital and noted venture capitalist Lee Fixel. General Atlantic took part as well.

Chronosphere, founded in 2019, provides a cloud-based platform that companies can use to track the health of their IT infrastructure and find issues such as application slowdowns. The platform is based on an open-source data processing system called M3 that the startup’s founders had developed while working at Uber Technologies Inc. as engineers. Uber open-sourced the system in 2018.

Using M3, Chronosphere says that its platform can collect tens of billions of data points about a company’s IT environment to give administrators insight into potential technical issues. The startup is pitching the platform as a more scalable alternative to Prometheus, a popular open-source tool that is many IT teams’ go-to choice for monitoring infrastructure. Prometheus can encounter reliability issues when it’s used to process very large data volumes, which Chronosphere believes creates a need for a more robust solution.

The volume of incoming data is an especially big factor in cloud-native environments that use technologies such as software containers. A single containerized workload can have dozens or hundreds of individual components, each of which may be generating useful operational information. 

Besides Prometheus, Chronosphere argues its platform can be a more compelling alternative to the commercial monitoring tools out there. Many of the solutions in the category are billed based on how much data a company processes, which can lead to cost overruns because the volume of information generated by an IT environment is difficult to predict. Chronosphere claims it reduces costs up to tenfold by providing controls that allow customers to limit monitoring-related expenses.

The startup announced its platform’s general availability today, in conjunction with the funding news, following a year of beta testing. During the beta program, Chronosphere says its customer base has grown to include one of the largest delivery app companies, a multinational financial services firm and other “well-known brands.”

“Chronosphere’s incredible customer wins and growth since Greylock led the Series A in 2019 show how badly customers need a cloud-native monitoring solution,” said Greylock Partner Jerry Chen, who is a director on the Chronosphere board. Greylock led a $11 million funding round into the startup in late 2019.

Chen discussed that first investment in Chronosphere on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE studio not long after it was announced (below). “They’re going to handle that horizontal amount of data, petabytes and petabytes, cheaper, better, faster at scale,” Chen said. “As a startup founder or as a VC, you want to pick a wave bigger than you and bigger than your competitors.”

Chronosphere has raised more than $50 million to date.

Image: Unsplash