BigPanda Inc., a fast-growing startup competing in the AIOps segment of the enterprise software market, today said that it has closed a $190 million funding round at a $1.2 billion valuation.

Advent International and Insight Partners co-led the round.

AIOps is the term for software tools that use artificial intelligence to automate some of the manual tasks involved in running a company’s information technology environment. In the case of BigPanda, the startup’s namesake AIOps platform uses AI to streamline the process of troubleshooting technical issues. The Mountain View, California-based startup counts Cisco Systems Inc., Sony Corp. and Autodesk Inc. among its customers.

The typical enterprise uses not one but several monitoring tools to detect technical issues in its IT infrastructure. When a technical issue emerges, each monitoring tool collects a different set of data points about the problem. Fully understanding the problem and how to fix it requires administrators to combine the different data points, which takes a great deal of time.

BigPanda’s AIOps platform promises to speed up the task. The software automatically aggregates logs about a technical issue from the various monitoring tools used by a company and combines them into a single dataset. Administrators don’t have to manually combine the data, which BigPanda says saves time and therefore allows IT teams to fix malfunctioning systems faster. 

Once administrators assemble all the data they require to troubleshoot an outage, they have to run analyses to identify the root cause of the issue. BigPanda promises to help with that task as well.

One of the factors that make IT troubleshooting challenging in the enterprise is the existence of complex dependencies between systems. If a relational database experiences an outage, the issue may cause the applications that store their information in the relational database to experience malfunctions as well. Those malfunctioning applications, in turn, might be connected to another set of IT systems that could indirectly be impacted too. 

BigPanda’s platform uses AI to identify the most likely root cause of a malfunction. In conjunction, the platform generates a timeline of how the malfunction unfolded. If the timeline indicates, for example, that an application outage was preceded by an error in a relational database on which the application depends, administrators can focus their troubleshooting efforts accordingly.

The dependencies between a company’s IT assets are not always obvious. In a large company with upwards of thousands of different IT assets, determining which application depends on what system to work can take a great deal of effort. According to BigPanda, its platform automatically maps out how a company’s systems interact to make troubleshooting easier.  

“The scale of the digital economy is rapidly growing,” said BigPanda co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Assaf Resnick. “At the same time, enterprise adoption of cloud and cloud-native environments has reached a tipping point. This has placed a huge burden on IT Operations teams in terms of the growing scale and complexity of the IT data that must be consumed and responded to in order to keep digital businesses running. These teams are turning to BigPanda for help.”

BigPanda’s approach to speeding up IT troubleshooting is gaining traction in the market. The startup said today that its annual recurring revenues grew 155% year-over-year in 2021, though it didn’t disclose absolute numbers. BigPanda’s sales momentum was driven partly by a fivefold increase in the number of deals worth more than $1 million that it inked with customers.

The startup will use its new $190 million funding round to accelerate growth initiatives. As part of the effort, BigPanda will expand its research and development, product and machine learning teams. The startup also intends to accelerate go-to-market plans, as well as make strategic acquisitions. 

AIOps tools are becoming increasingly popular in the enterprise. ScienceLogic Inc., another AIOps startup, last year raised a $105 million funding round from a group of investors that included Intel Capital. Major enterprise IT suppliers such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. are also adding AI-powered automation features to their products.

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