Cloud native is the new order of business. To contend with the complex, dynamic and ephemeral nature of the modern cloud environment, enterprise organizations need monitoring technology at a level unmet by tools designed for the cloud transition era. And they need it at a scale larger than ever before.
Enter Chronosphere. Founded in 2019 by Martin Mao and Rob Skillington, who developed the open-source metrics engine M3 at Uber, Chronosphere was formed out of the recognition that more and more organizations needed a purpose-built platform to monitor cloud-native apps and make precise, data-driven decisions. While some open-source monitoring tools were available, they either couldn’t deliver at scale, weren’t able to reach across different geographies, or became prohibitively expensive without delivering true value.
“If you look at today’s existing tools, none of them were really built for the sheer scale of the data being produced in a cloud native world,” said Chronosphere CEO Martin Mao. “Most platforms can’t ingest the data and they can’t leverage it in real time. And in a cloud-native world, when you are doing continuous deployments, you need to know within seconds if something has gone wrong.”
Seeing how these limitations were preventing enterprises from optimizing their business for cloud, Chronosphere developed a monitoring platform that lets organizations store and retrieve billions of data points generated from cloud-native environments. Just over a year and a half later, Chronopshere has quickly become an indispensable partner to both large enterprises and startups, and announced their $43 million Series B. (Greylock led the series A, and participated in this latest series B round, led by Lux and Lee Fixel.)
In this episode of Greymatter, Greylock general partner and Chronosphere board member Jerry Chen sat down with Martin and Rob to discuss the company’s growth, the current state of cloud technology, and the challenges and advantages of starting a company just before the global crisis of 2020.
You can listen to the podcast here.
