Loggly, a startup helping companies like Intuit, Airbnb, and BBC track their application logs, just announced that it has raised $5.7 million in new funding.
The company has new executives too — new CEO Charlie Oppenheimer (former CEO of Digital Fountain and Aptiva, and most recently Executive in Residence at Loggly’s new investor Matrix Partners) and new CTO and Vice President of Engineering Jim Nisbet (former CTO at RSA, Tablus, and DataTools). Oppenheimer tells me that even though he’s being officially announced as new CEO today, he’s actually been on the job for about three months.
Loggly’s founding team came from IT search engine Splunk, and it aimed to provide a fun (yes, really) approach to tracking server activity. Oppenheimer says Loggly allows companies to take a close look at individual user sessions to see where things might be going wrong, and also to answer the more general questions of “What’s going on?” and “How are we doing?” by looking at a variety of different graphs, for example comparing an app’s performance the week after new code was added with the performance the week before. By receiving this data as a web service, Loggly customers don’t have to buy servers and pay engineers to keep the system up. The company is now serving more than 2,500 customers, Oppenheimer says.
As for why Loggly needed new executives, Oppenheimer praises the founding team, calling founding CEO Kord Campbell “a very creative guy,” but he says that as the company is growing, it was time for someone more seasoned at the top.
“It happens all the time,” Oppenheimer says.
Still, he doesn’t want Loggly to lose its sense of fun, as exemplified by its beaver mascot. The beaver will stick around, though Oppenheimer says he may start looking a little more “smart and trustworthy and strong” and a little less like he “missed a day at a 12-step program.”
“How many cloud-based companies have you seen with blue-and-white websites?” Oppenheimer says, later adding, “It’s so rare that you can get that kind of fun, emotional connection with your customers, and if you’ve got it, you’ve got to develop it, nurture it. We ain’t going blue-and-white.”
The new funding was an extension of the $4.2 million Series A that the company raised two years ago. The money comes from Matrix and previous investors Trinity Ventures and True Ventures.