In late 2013, Errplane, a Y Combinator-backed startup, began developing an open source project called InfluxDB for database performance monitoring and alerting. After Errplane raised several million in funding from venture capital firms including Mayfield Fund and Trinity Ventures, Errplane changed its name to Inflow data — and went on to raise tens of millions more in capital.

Years later, it seems that InfluxData is still doing something right. The company announced late last week that it had raised $30 million in debt and $51 million in a Series E equity round led by Princeville Capital and Citi Ventures with participation from Battery Ventures, Mayfield and Sapphire Ventures, sources say to a higher rating than Series D in 2019. CEO Evan Kaplan tells australiabusinessblog.com that the combined $81 million will be spent developing InfluxData’s new database engine, InfluxDB IOx, as well as dedicated cloud layers and building a new on-premise, enterprise-focused InfluxDB product on top of InfluxDB IOx.

When asked why InfluxData decided to take out a loan in addition to the new equity, Kaplan said it’s “common” for the company “depending on market conditions and growth requirements.” Easier access to debt in the technology industry likely also played a role. By the end of 2022, technology debt deal value surpassed 2021 figures with more than $29 billion raised in 2,188 deals, according to to PitchBook’s Venture-Monitor report.

“Analyzing data in real time is a huge challenge due to the sheer volume of data today’s applications, systems and devices create,” Kaplan said via email. “InfluxDB gives developers the ability to separate relevant signals from the ‘noise’ caused by this huge amount of data.”

Platforms like InfluxData have come into vogue in recent years as the demand for real-time data analytics tools grows. SingleStore, which provides a platform to help enterprises integrate, monitor and query their data as a single entity, has raised more than $100 million in capital to date. implyanother real-time database provider, closed a $100 million Series D round in May that values ​​the company at $1.1 billion post-money.

Kaplan argues that databases built specifically for analyzing real-time data — also known as time-series data, or data captured over consistent time intervals — offer advantages over the relational databases companies typically use for their data workload. For example, while relational databases have a defined schema, meaning changes such as adding or removing columns require database migrations, time series databases are often “schemaless” and new fields can be added quickly and easily.

“Within the time series universe itself, managing high cardinality data volumes is a major challenge: getting, transforming and storing the right data in a way that makes it easy to extract value from it,” said Kaplan. “That’s why a purpose-built time series solution is critical; it lowers the barrier to entry and streamlines the impact that datasets can have.”

According to Kaplan, InfluxData’s customers primarily use the company’s platform to access infrastructure, systems, apps and customer data in real time and to centralize metrics, events, logs and trace data across the organization. Those with physical assets also collect sensor and device data using InfluxData, whether from plants, factories, smart devices or satellites.

“InfluxDB accelerates the pace at which organizations extract value from data,” said Kaplan. “IT teams using InfluxDB can query data immediately after it is written, often measured in milliseconds, unlike many other data warehouses that rely on batch ingestion and delayed processing before delivering insights. By providing true real-time insights, InfluxDB enables businesses to collect and process massive volumes of data faster than ever before.”

Besides the funding, the big news from InfluxData is the launch of the aforementioned InfluxDB IOx, which was announced last November. Kaplan explains that InfluxDB IOx “reinvents” InfluxDB as a columnar, real-time data service, giving users a time-series engine designed to ingest and analyze large amounts of data at high speed.

InfluxDB IOx expands the number and variety of use cases InfluxDB can handle, such as observability and distributed tracing, says Kaplan, while supporting “the full range” of time-series data. In addition, the rebuilt engine adds SQL language support for queries, bringing the ubiquitous data programming language to InfluxDB for the first time.

“The release of InfluxDB IOx has significantly enhanced the key benefits of the platform with the introduction of SQL support, the removal of cardinality limits, and real-time queries that are up to 100x faster,” continued Kaplan. “Customer interest in the new database engine is strong and we are optimistic about the product roadmap to bring InfluxDB IOx to a larger developer pool. Additionally, since InfluxDB IOx fully supports the golden triangle of observable data – stats, logs, and traces all in a single database – we can compete more aggressively in Internet of Things, cloud sensing, and other resource-intensive analytics settings.

australiabusinessblog.com cannot independently verify those performance claims. But on the customer side, InfluxData is objectively sound (assuming the numbers Kaplan gave me are accurate, of course), with more than 1,900 commercial customers, including Hulu, Siemens, Tesla, Cisco, and IBM.

Kaplan acknowledged that InfluxData faces increasing competition from AWS (see: Timestream) and Microsoft Azure (Azure Data Explorer) and emerging open source vendors (Timescale, QuestDB). But he believes the InfluxDB IOx rollout and new round of funding put the company in a strong position.

“InfluxDB currently has 750,000 users deploying InfluxDB’s cloud service, with 6,000 new users per month,” Kaplan added, declining to reveal the company’s burn rate or annual recurring revenue. “As a sign of our continued growth, InfluxData currently has approximately 165 employees and expects to expand its workforce by approximately 10% by the end of 2023.”

With the close of Series E, InfluxData’s total equity financing stands at $171 million.