It’s tough to recover from catastrophic system failures when you’re flying blind. Yet, many companies admit they’re doing just that — flying blind, more or less — where it concerns their software and critical infrastructure.
In a recent survey by Logz.io, the observability platform provider, 64% of businesses report over an hour mean time to recovery — in large part because they’re encountering roadblocks in getting the data they need to diagnose the underlying issues.
Now, there’s no shortage of observability vendors claiming to offer definitive solutions to this problem. But Krishna Yadappanavar — who previously co-founded a startup, Springpath, that Cisco acquired for $320 million in 2017 — thought there was room for one more.
With Springpath colleague Ashish Hanwadikar and Pankaj Thakkar, a former VMware engineer, Yadappanavar co-founded Kloudfuse, which provides several tools for data observability across different compute environments. (Yes — that’s “Cloudfuse” spelled with a “K” instead of a “C.”) Kloudfuse today emerged from stealth with $23 million in funding, inclusive of a $17 million Series A round led by Newlands with participation from Blumberg Capital, Aspenwood Ventures, High Sage and Exponent.
“Hanwadikar, Thakkar and I saw an opportunity to help developers, DevOps and site reliability engineers, who spend significant time managing observability, troubleshooting data and analytics and lack automation capabilities,” Yadappanavar told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We co-founded Kloudfuse with the mission of making unified cloud observability more accessible and scalable to enterprises, enabling them to handle increased cardinality, gain more control and reduce costs.”
Through Kloudfuse’s platform — which is technically a data lake, a centralized repository for unstructured observability data — customers can analyze metrics, events, logs and traces from various software apps and machines. Kloudfuse automatically alerts them to anomalies in the data that might suggest something’s amiss.
“Economic factors such as high interest rates and fears of a looming recession are forcing organizations to cut observability bills,” Yadappanavar said. “Thus, enterprises are being forced to balance keeping costs low without sacrificing safety, efficiency and performance … Kloudfuse is well-prepared to weather potential economic headwinds, as the company is helping to solve a significant problem that touches all enterprises regardless of their size, sector and structure.”
As alluded to, Kloudfuse has many rivals in the observability space — Acceldata, Sifflet, Observe and Manta, to name a few. But Yadappanavar claims revenue has tripled in the last two quarters as Kloudfuse’s customer base has grown to include household brands like Workday, GE HealthCare and Automation Anywhere.
David Blumberg, managing partner at Blumberg Capital, had this to say via email: “We continue to invest in Kloudfuse because enterprises need a better way to maximize data observability while controlling budgets, without sacrificing security, efficiency and performance. Krishna and team have earned the trust of large, sophisticated enterprises across industries, and delivered value quickly.”
Kloudfuse plans to use the proceeds from the latest funding round to expand its product management, marketing and sales teams.