Why Lightspeed invested in Grafana Labs
Walk into any enterprise that needs to monitor IT infrastructure and applications today, and there’s a very good chance you’ll bump into someone using Grafana (or even see it displayed up on a big screen). With over 400,000 active installations and millions of users, it’s arguably the most popular open source project for time series data, metrics, and monitoring.
Grafana started off as a side project of co-founder Torkel Ödegaard. The spirit behind the project was to make exploring data and creating dashboards simple, beautiful, and functional. He also sought to make the tools of observability truly accessible to everyone in an organization, not just a single person. I simply love these three posters from the early days of the project that capture the company’s spirit and mission circa 2015:
We first met the Grafana founders in the beautiful city of Stockholm last summer. Torkel, Raj, and Anthony hail from Stockholm, New York, and Perth respectively and so we were all seriously jetlagged. Despite that, we bonded over the common belief that being globally distributed can be a major advantage in hiring talent and also building a great business. We were blown away by how the team grew Grafana Labs thoughtfully and efficiently over the last five years, putting open source principles and community at the forefront. At the same time, the company has helped over 500 commercial customers be even more successful with the technology via their paid Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud offerings.
Grafana Labs’ vision is to become the first, true open and composable observability platform. The company has built a fully open source offering that combines metrics, logs, and tracing into one cohesive, integrated solution. We believe that the Grafana UI is the secret sauce that ties these three pillars of observability together, and allows the company to succeed where many others have failed. The company has also developed Grafana Loki (for logging) and has been a major influencer behind Prometheus and Cortex, important pieces of data infrastructure that enable a shift to a cloud and microservices-based architecture. Most importantly, Grafana’s ‘big tent’ philosophy means it embraces integrating with a variety of popular datastores, never locking in its users. We believe this multi-pronged, collaborative approach will win the hearts and minds of the DevOps community. Today, Grafana Labs announced a $24M Series A financing led by Lightspeed to help achieve this vision. We are honored to be part of the journey.
— Gaurav Gupta & Brad Twohig, Lightspeed Venture Partners
