Sumo Logic, the cloud-based log analysis platform, announced a $75 million round today, as the seven year old company could be entering the home stretch before an IPO.
While CEO Ramin Sayar was not ready or willing to commit to an IPO timeline, he did admit it was the next logical step for the company, and that the size of the investment gives him the capital to build toward that event.
Sayar would not discuss the current valuation, but today’s round brings the total raised to $235 million since inception 7 years ago, and follows an $80 million round almost exactly two years ago.
The round was led by Sapphire Ventures and a virtual Who’s Who of Silicon Valley investors including Accel Partners, DFJ Growth, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Sequoia Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures.
Jai Das, managing director at lead investor Sapphire Ventures certainly likes the growth trajectory and believes the company is well positioned for success. “The entire analytics sector is being turned upside down by the tectonic shifts in cloud computing, mobile and machine learning, creating the opportunity for new innovative companies to thrive and win major market share,” Das said in a statement. He’s betting Sumo can continue taking advantage of those trends.
Sumo helps companies monitor log data, as well as event and time series data. It’s applying that data to security, threat detection and building a better understanding of what’s happening across your network, all in a cloud-native package.
In fact, with 1500 paying customers and 30,000 active daily users, Sayar claims the company is analyzing 100 petabytes of data every single day. That’s a serious amount of data, and he believes it requires a pure cloud solution to process it. As the company grows and expands into monitoring Internet of Things (as it plans to do with this influx of cash), that requirement should become even more pronounced as even more data comes flowing into its systems.
Humans cannot possibly process that amount of data, and as you might expect, Sumo has turned to machine learning to help customers understand the massive amounts of data better. The more data they have as the company grows, the better those machine learning models should get at understanding patterns in the data.
Last week, Elastic purchased Opbeat to expand from search, analytics and log analysis to applications performance management (APM) — and Sayar says that’s definitely an area that would be a logical extension of what they are doing, just as it was for Elastic. While he didn’t say when it would happen, it is something the company is thinking about doing with this new money.
Founded in 2010, Sumo Logic also competes with Splunk, Loggly and LogRhythm. Customers include Zuora, Toyota, Airbnb and Delta to name just a few examples.
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