Grafana Labs Snags $270M In New Funding, Boosts Valuation To Over $6B

The open-source observability platform software developer says its fast-growing customer base has increased its annual recurring revenue to more than $250 million.

Grafana Labs, developer of a popular open-source observability platform, has collected $270 million in new funding that puts the company’s valuation at more than $6 billion, the company said Wednesday.

Grafana Labs, headquartered in New York, also said it has achieved $250 million in annual recurring revenue and now has more than 5,000 customers.

“We’ve accomplished so much in the almost 10 years since Grafana Labs was established. The open-source side project my co-founder Torkel Ödegaard created now has 20 million users worldwide and has become the foundation of a sustainable business and market leader in observability,” said Raj Dutt, Grafana Labs CEO and co-founder, in a statement.

Observability systems are used to monitor the operations and performance of applications, data, cloud infrastructure, AI systems and other IT. Competitors in the crowded space include Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic and Observe, along with major companies like Cisco Systems with its AppDynamics product, IBM with Instana and Splunk (recently acquired by Cisco) with its Observability Cloud.

Grafana Labs’ open-source software, including the self-managed Grafana Enterprise and fully managed Grafana Cloud platform, provides a composable monitoring and observability stack for building operational observability dashboards and data visualization systems.

In April 2022 Grafana Labs announced a Series D funding round of $240 million.

Wednesday the company said in a statement that it had successfully completed “a primary and secondary transaction” extension of the Series D funding in the amount of approximately $270 million “in proceeds to the company and certain of its stockholders.” (A company spokesman confirmed that the new funding is in addition to the earlier $240 million.)

The company said the latest funding put its valuation at over $6 billion.

The latest funding was led by existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from all existing institutional investors including GIC, Sequoia Capital, Coatue, Lead Edge Capital, J.P. Morgan and K5 Global. CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, joined as a new investor.

Grafana Labs plans to devote the additional capital to accelerate its product development, “enabling the company to strengthen its market leadership while strategically pursuing future M&A opportunities,” the company said.

“When Lightspeed first invested in Grafana Labs’ Series A in 2019, we were confident in the company’s strategy,” Lightspeed partner Gaurav Gupta said in the statement.

“We knew that open-source companies were rewriting the narrative, transitioning from merely free alternatives to releasing technology that rivals or surpasses proprietary solutions. Grafana exemplifies this shift—there’s nothing that compares to their capabilities in operational dashboarding. They’ve been on a tear releasing so many new products and building what clearly is the strongest open-source observability platform in the market,” Gupta said.

In its funding announcement, Grafana Labs touted its momentum, saying that its commercial customer roster now exceeds 5,000, including Citigroup, Bloomberg and TomTom, with more than 20 million users. The company said customer growth has propelled the company’s annual recurring revenue “well beyond” $250 million.