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Series C Investment Round Boosts Grafana Labs’ Valuation

$220million accrued in the Series C investment round, seeing new individuals join the Grafana Labs board.

Sept. 3, 2021, 10:55 p.m.

TL;DR

August 24, 2021, saw Grafana Labs raise $220 million in a fundraiser co-hosted by representatives from new investors, Sequoia Capital, and Coatue, and graced by reputable participants.

In high spirits, Grafana Labs is making improvements to Grafana Cloud's free forever tier.

Key Facts

1
The investment sees Grafana Labs' valuation boost to $3bn.
2
Former VMware and ServiceNow presidents get seats on the Grafana Labs board following the event.
3
In high spirits, Grafana Labs would be making substantial modifications to the free-forever tier.
4
Grafana Labs has doubled its personnel count over the last year.

Details

It has been growing galore for tech startup Grafana Labs since 2019. It is nice to see young kids grow and, in the same vein, see startups bloom. It's been just two years since Grafana Labs had its Series A investment round raising about $24m, according to Crunchbase logs. And just a year since it raised $50m in a Series B funding hosted by existing investor, LightSpeed Venture Partners.

The report-relevant series C funding saw the New York-based open source tech join the $3billion valuation club from the straits of the $300m club just two years ago. A lot of startups and seasoned enterprises enjoyed outstanding growth during the coronavirus pandemic. Was Covid a significant factor in Grafana Labs' hardly predictable growth? Yes, most definitely.

It’s been an incredible year at Grafana Labs, highlighted by the rapid adoption of Grafana Cloud, the growth of our Loki logs, and Prometheus metrics offerings. The introduction of Tempo 1.0 for tracing and the continued development of the Grafana frontend.
Raj Dutt
Co-founder and CEO at Grafana Labs

New investors in Coatue and Sequoia Capital co-led this investment round, with existing investors, Lead Edge Capital, LightSpeed Venture Partners, and GIC recorded as participants. Following the fundraising, David Schneider, former President of ServiceNow, currently a partner at Coatue, and former President and COO of VMware, Carl Eschenbach, will join the company's board of directors.

In high spirits, Grafana Labs is making improvements to Grafana Cloud's free forever tier. Adding 50GB of traces to the 50GB of logs, 10,000 series of Prometheus metrics, and 3 Grafana dashboard users is a high volume of generosity. Grafana Cloud and the on-premises Grafana Enterprise Stack project holds access to Jira, Datadog, Elasticsearch, Snowflake, Splunk, AppDynamics, ServiceNow, and Oracle, MongoDB, and other free and commercial plugins.

Since the beginning of the year, Grafana Labs has doubled the numbers on its payroll, with about 500 of these contributing remotely from 40 different countries.

New board member Carl Eschenbach praised Grafana Labs' marauding progress, highlighting the breathtaking strides the company took from evolving from a single open source project to one deployed by heavyweights in Bloomberg, eBay, Sony, JP Morgan's Chase, PayPal, and thousands of companies worldwide. He also likened the company's strides to that of VMware. Grafana Labs recently announced the acquisitions of k6 for modern load testing and Pace.dev for producing developer tools as part of its aim to bring value to commercial customers and the open source community.