INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Grafana Labs, the commercial company built to support the open-source Grafana project, announced a healthy $24 million Series A investment
Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with participation from Lead Edge Capital.Company CEO and co-founder Raj Dutt says the startup
started life as a way to offer a commercial layer on top of the open-source Grafana tool, but it has expanded and now supports other
projects, including Loki, an open-source monitoring tool not unlike Prometheus, which the company developed last year.All of this in the
service of connecting to data sources and monitoring data
open-source observability platform for metrics, logs and traces
Labs is the commercial arm of the open-source projects, and offers a couple of products built on top of these tools
First of all it has Grafana Enterprise, a package that includes enterprise-focused data connectors, enhanced authentication and security and
enterprise-class support over and above what the open-source Grafana tool offers.The company also offers a SaaS version of the Grafana tool
stack, which is fully managed and takes away a bunch of the headaches of trying to download raw open-source code, install it, manage it and
deal with updates and patches
In the SaaS version, all of that is taken care of for the customer for a monthly fee.Dutt says the startup took just $4 million in external
investment over the first five years, and has been able to build a business with 100 employees and 500 customers
He is particularly proud of the fact that the company is cash flow break-even at this point.Grafana Labs decided the time was right to take
and that can translate into building a sustainable business
