The unstructured nature of the data generated by the connected universe is only one of the operational challenges that make analyzing it so difficult. There’s also the fact that a lot of machine-generated logs must be organized based on the order of their creation to make them useful, a task InfluxData Inc. is working to simplify with the support of investment giant Battery Ventures.

The firm led a $16 million funding round into the startup today with the help of Mayfield, Trinity Ventures and Bloomberg Beta. The capital will fuel InfluxData’s efforts to widen the adoption of its namesake NoSQL store, which is specifically geared towards processing time-sensitive records. This spares organizations the hassle of writing custom code to accommodate their fast-moving information and thus makes it easier to carry out analysis than alternatives like MongoDB.

InfluxData distributes the core system under an open-source license and monetizes it with a set of value-added technologies designed to automate large-scale deployments. The lineup consists of a tool called Telegraf that aims to ease the collection of time-series data, an ETL engine and a dashboarding tool for visualizing the information that is marketed under the name Kapacitator. The offerings together form a platform that the startup refers to as the TICK stack and describes as the “first purpose-built, end-to-end solution for collecting, storing, visualizing and alerting on time-series data at scale.”

InfluxData’s website boasts that its software is used at Cisco Systems Inc., eBay Inc., Elon Musk’s Solar City and numerous other large organizations to perform time-series analytics. A big portion of the startup’s customers employ its database to analyze logs from their IT infrastructure and find long-term operational changes, but it’s also finding use in other areas like tracking changes in sensory measurements. And there are numerous potential applications outside the connected universe too in areas such as stock monitoring and scientific observation.

Today’s investment will help broaden the appeal of the system even further by enabling InfluxData to step up product development efforts. TechCrunch reports that the effort will focus in large part on developing additional commercial offerings to complement its database. Plus, the startup is also planning to scale sales and marketing efforts in a bid to gain more enterprise customers. InfluxData will need to work hard if it wants to keep up better-established rivals such as IBM Corp. and Basho Technologies Inc.  that are also developing time-series databases.

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