Wavefront Raises $52M in Series B Funding to Accelerate Leadership in Cloud Application Monitoring for Enterprises and SaaS Companies

A Message from the CEO – Pete Cittadini

Today, we announced our new $52M Series B funding.
(View the press release on BusinessWire here. You can also see the complete press release at end of this blog post.)

We’re very excited about our new investors as well as the continuing support from our existing investors. Wavefront is riding a mega-wave in terms of market momentum, and our enthusiasm is shared by our many customers and prospects. I relish the opportunity to build a great company, working with such a deeply knowledgeable team of SaaS monitoring experts. Our new and different approach to monitoring – centered on metrics – is truly changing the way cloud and modern application performance is optimized.

$52M is a significant amount of funding in a Series B round. Typical B rounds are usually in the $15-20M range. So why did we raise so much money now?

Well, one answer would be because we could! Practically any startup would raise more money at the right valuation AND if they have a compelling plan to win big with the capital to be invested. Wavefront has both. Our Series B company valuation increased nearly 4x from the Series A valuation. This is because we’re doing extremely well on the customer adoption front – use of our product has multiplied over 10x since last funding, most of that in the past year. Our product is also resonating extremely well in the market, our close partnership and collaboration with all of our initial customers has really paid off. Our management team is also now complete, and we have attracted many of the top operational enterprise SaaS leaders in our industry. Together, this enabled us to command a high step-up in company valuation, which then gave us the option to raise more money than any comparable competitor.

The real business reason for the $52M Series B funding is to reduce one of the three risks any startup faces.

All technology startups face three primary risks:

• Product-market fit risk
• Capital risk
• Operational risk

Our technology/product innovation and evolution over the past 3.5 years has cemented the product-market fit risk shut. Our customers love us and tell us that building and deploying applications in a modern cloud environment without Wavefront would be like being a millennial without a smart phone.

This Series B round now eliminates the capital risk for the next several years so we can invest in this large market opportunity that Wavefront has in a professional manner, taking all appropriate business/company investments straight on.

As for the operational risk, well, that’s what I’m here for — and I am shoulder-to-shoulder with one of the finest leadership teams I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. Together, with the rest of the current and future Wavefront employees, we will build one hell of an enterprise SaaS company that the industry will remember for decades to come. Prospective Wavefront employees, if you want a passionate tech adventure versus a job, look us up!

Growing up as a kid on east coast of the USA, I liked to watch the beach party films from the 1960s, in ‘exotic’ locations like Hawaii and California. In them, the term “Big Kahuna” was popularized to refer to the best surfer on the beach. Today, Wavefront has become the Big Kahuna for monitoring modern cloud applications. With our different, metrics-centric approach to monitoring, Wavefront is best way to assure the ultimate customer experience for your applications running on cloud. So if you’re ready to surf metrics like never before, come take us out for a ride.

Press Release

Wavefront Raises $52M in Series B Funding to Accelerate Leadership in Cloud Application Monitoring for Enterprises and SaaS Companies

PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 25, 2016 — Wavefront, the leading metrics monitoring service for cloud and modern application environments, today announced that it has secured $52 million in a Series B funding round. Existing investors Sequoia Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures were joined by new investor Tenaya Capital, and other equity holders. The funding comes as the company is experiencing hyper-growth since its Series A funding, and the company’s valuation increased by 4x from the Series A. The new capital will be used to accelerate research and development to expand its product offerings, as well as expansion of Wavefront’s sales, marketing and support operations across all global regions.

“Cloud-enabled companies adopting Wavefront get crucially valuable insights that no other monitoring platform can offer, so their business experiences less degradation, fewer outages and more customer success,” said Pete Cittadini, President & CEO of Wavefront. “We surpassed key milestones this past year, so it became the ideal time to raise this round, and fuel our already impressive adoption into the SaaS 250, as well as into digital enterprises and e-commerce companies that are fully embracing the cloud.”

In addition to raising its Series B funding, Wavefront has achieved several notable milestones since its Series A funding:

• Increased the aggregate metric data ingestion rate into its service by more than 10x.
• Moved key customers wins into production including Workday, Box, Intuit, Lyft, Groupon, Okta, British Gas, Citrix, Doordash, Xactly, Edmunds.com, and Medallia.
• Developed 30+ data plugins to ingest metrics across leading application, cloud, and infrastructure sources.
• Introduced new product functionality including intelligent alerting, expanded query functions, quick start configuration wizards and a suite of default dashboards.
• Attracted CEO, CFO, CMO, VP Sales, and VP Engineering executives with over 100 years of experience in systems monitoring, enterprise software, and hyper-growth startups.

“In the previous decade, the engineering team at Google faced operational challenges driven by growing complexity,” said Bill Coughran, Sequoia partner and former Google SVP of Engineering. “Today a whole new generation of companies are operating at scale and running into these same issues. At Google, we needed to build our own solution. Now companies can just use Wavefront.“

“We have been impressed with Wavefront’s innovative technology solutions, category creation leadership and impressive growth,” said Brian Melton, Managing Director at Tenaya Capital. “Tenaya Capital has helped build successful IT infrastructure companies including New Relic, Hortonworks, and Palo Alto Networks, and we are looking forward to participating in Wavefront’s new phase of global growth via this partnership.”

Any enterprise with modern applications and agile infrastructure built on software—including SaaS offerings, digital enterprise platforms, consumer web platforms (e-commerce sites and mobile apps), and IoT systems—can employ Wavefront to improve its performance, availability and customer experience, and also extend beyond operations management to:

• Prevent, detect and diagnose outages to maintain service continuity.
• Surpass traditional monitoring to manipulate data with powerful analytics in real-time.
• Promote enterprise agility with better capacity planning and resource utilization.
• Eliminate silos and standardize analytics with a unified big data analytics platform across the TechOps, DevOps, and Development functions.
• Gain insights faster about the relationship between device, software, and end user.

Metrics monitoring as a service is a new and disruptive approach to cloud application monitoring, helping cloud-enabled companies to thrive in the age of big data and the constant need to maintain high performance at scale. It allows users to visualize and query a wide range of metrics, from cloud computing load to application and business performance data. Across every layer of the enterprise, a metrics monitoring platform needs to deliver scale and reliability in real-time. Wavefront’s metrics monitoring service unifies and processes millions of data points per second, delivering insights at the speed of thought, for enterprises at scale.

About Wavefront

Wavefront is the ultimate metrics monitoring service for cloud and modern application environments. Its observability and analytics tools enable DevOps functions at SaaS companies where power, scale, performance, and reliability are essential to their business. The company helps software leaders like Workday, Box, Lyft, Microsoft, Intuit and Groupon to ensure superior customer experience with the combination of the most powerful query language in monitoring running against a unified, full detail, big data metric store in real-time with no limits. Visit Wavefront Blog and follow us on Twitter, @WavefrontHQ.