Chronosphere Inc., a startup helping enterprises analyze machine-generated data from their technology infrastructure, has closed $200 million in funding at a valuation exceeding $1 billion.

Announced this morning, the round was led by prominent tech investor General Atlantic. Addition, Greylock, Lux Capital and Founders Fund contributed as well.

Chronosphere’s new unicorn status is particularly notable given that the startup launched less than two and a half years ago. The $1 billion-plus valuation makes Chronosphere one of the top 10 fastest-growing startups in the enterprise software-as-a-service market, according to PitchBook Data Inc. research.

New York-based Chronosphere provides a cloud platform that can analyze the data generated by a company’s information technology assets to find technical issues. The platform is based on an open-source system called M3 that the startup’s founders developed during their time at Uber Technologies Inc.’s engineering organization. The tentpole feature of M3 feature is scalability: The system can ingest tens of billions of data points describing the state of a company’s IT environment.

Chronosphere’s platform adds features not found in the open-source version. Administrators have access to controls that allow them to regulate what and how much information is processed, which helps limit the infrastructure costs associated with data processing initiatives. The  platform is delivered as a managed service that spares IT teams the hassle of manually maintaining a deployment of the M3 system.

Chronosphere is looking to win over enterprises from the open-source Prometheus tool, one of the industry’s most popular IT monitoring platforms. 

Prometheus can encounter reliability issues when analyzing large volumes of information, which represents a challenge for large enterprises with a lot of systems to monitor. The more systems there are in a corporate network, the more information is generated. Chronosphere says that its platform’s ability to ingest tens of billions of data points makes it a more compelling choice for organizations with large-scale IT environments.

Chronosphere’s value proposition has drawn significant industry interest. The startup’s annual recurring revenue is currently in the “multimillion-dollar” range after climbing more than 900% since the start of 2021. Chronosphere says it’s inking deals worth six to seven figures with customers, which include tech startups and Fortune 500 companies. 

“We’re helping some of the most advanced engineering organizations in the world gain reliable visibility of their cloud-native workloads while simultaneously helping them control their rampant growth in data volume and cost,” said Chronosphere co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Martin Mao. “These are challenges that no other SaaS provider has been able to address.”

With the proceeds from its latest funding round, Chronosphere plans to grow its headcount from 80 employees to 115 by year’s end and build more features. The startup has already been making big investments in product development. Chronosphere’s newest capability, a distributed tracing tool, launched this morning in conjunction with the funding announcement.

Distributed tracing is a troubleshooting technique that IT teams use to understand issues in applications made up of many individual software containers. An engineer sends a piece of data to the application and observes how it is processed by the various modules. The insights gained through the process help pinpoint which one of the dozens or hundreds of containers that make up a workload is causing technical issues.

In practice, however, distributed tracing can be difficult to apply. The process generates a large amount of troubleshooting data that, Chronosphere says, is challenging to process using traditional monitoring tools because of scalability limitations. Engineers have to discard much of the data and use only a subset to make decisions. According to Chronosphere, its platform’s scalability will allow users of its new distributed tracing feature to analyze all their data. 

The startup is promising other benefits as well, notably ease of use. Engineers often carry out distributed tracing with tools that run separately from the other software they use for application monitoring. Chronosphere’s new tool, in contrast, is integrated with its existing monitoring features.  

“Sitting at the intersection of the major trends transforming infrastructure software – the rise of open-source and the shift to containers – Chronosphere has quickly become a transformative player in observability,” said Anton Levy, global head of technology investing at General Atlantic.

Chronosphere has raised $255 million in funding to date. 

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