Every startup needs a steady diet of funding to keep it strong and growing. Datadog, a monitoring service that helps customers bring together data from across a variety of infrastructure and software is no exception.
Today it announced a massive $94.5 million Series D Round. The company would not discuss valuation.
The round was led by ICONIQ Capital. Existing investors Index Ventures, OpenView Ventures, Amplify Partners, Contour Ventures and other unnamed equity holders also participated. The funding comes almost exactly a year after the company announced a $31 million round and brings the total investment to just under $148 million.
As you might expect from a company that has scored $125.5 million in one year, it seems to be doing quite well for itself. In fact, CEO Olivier Pomel reports the company has been tripling its revenue over the last four years and more than tripled it in 2015, but he says 90 percent of the business is in the U.S.
He intends to use part of this money to try and change that. In the coming year, Pomel hopes to carve out markets in Europe, Asia and South America to expand beyond the several thousand customers the company already has. Naturally, that will involve adding new employees.
Over the last year, it has grown from around 75 employees at the time of the last funding announcement to 180 today. Pomel says that number should double again this year. The bulk of Datadog’s engineering team is based in New York City, but it also has a Research and Development office in Paris and plans to open sales offices in the EU as well as other international locations in the coming year.
Although Datadog’s service might sound like applications performance monitoring, Pomel says it tends to be at the center of an overall monitoring solution and is much broader. For instance, it might collect data from various systems including information from an applications performance monitoring tool like New Relic or AppDynamics and a log analysis tool like Splunk, then pull it all together into a single dashboard view for IT personnel to see the overall health of the IT systems. This can allow them to pinpoint problems and glitches across systems.
Pomel reports his company tends to compete with larger legacy vendors such as IBM, HP, BMC and CA, but he reports that the strongest competition tends to be open source solutions or companies trying to build something themselves.
While there are also startups out there trying to solve similar issues, Pomel says one of the big differences between his company and the rest of the analytics field is his company’s emphasis on the needs of IT, as opposed to a more business-centric focus.
Datadog Customers include Salesforce, Google, Zendesk, Airbnb and Samsung. Surprisingly Datadog also lists HP as a customer, despite selling its own monitoring tools.