Rapid Growth in Demand for Observability Fuels $50Million Series C for Honeycomb, Led by Insight Partners

Honeycomb, the leading observability platform used by high-performance engineering teams to quickly visualize, analyze, and improve cloud application quality and performance, announced the close of a $50 million Series C round, led by New York–based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Headline (formerly e.ventures), Storm Ventures, Industry Ventures, and NextWorld Capital. This round of funding brings the total capital raised to $96.9M for Honeycomb.

Observability is succeeding APM because it enables teams to quickly find critical issues in their cloud-native, microservices-based apps. Modern microservice architectures increase velocity and scale but also add painful complexity and unpredictability, which legacy APM tools fail to debug because they were built to examine simpler monolithic applications in predictable environments. Honeycomb is built to tame the complexity of modern applications. The recent round of funding comes as observability adoption rapidly accelerates and, according to O’Reilly Media, “Observability saw the greatest growth in the past year (128%), while monitoring is only up 9%.”

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Using machine analysis, a lightning-fast query engine, and integrated distributed tracing, Honeycomb users are able to slice and compare billions of rows of data about their systems across thousands of high-cardinality dimensions to quickly find patterns down to individual users and services. Unlike APM tools, observability provides a high level of data fidelity and exploratory tooling that makes the unpredictable quickly understandable, leading to better uptime, higher-quality and faster user experiences, more engineering time spent on innovation, and better business outcomes—the markers of high-performance engineering teams.

“We are very pleased to have Insight Partners join our existing investors as we scale to meet the demands for observability,” said Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb. “This infusion of capital accelerates our roadmap and international expansion, and helps ensure that observability and high-performance engineering practices are accessible to all teams—from SRE to product engineering, from novice to expert, from backend to client-side, and from startups to established enterprises going through digital transformation.”

“High-performing engineering teams are now a critical differentiator,” said George Mathew, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “As the world is increasingly digital, the companies that win are those that innovate faster, without sacrificing stability, which is a difficult challenge with today’s complex distributed systems. Honeycomb stood out as the clear leader in modern system observability and is uniquely suited to give teams what they need in both speed and agility.”

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Specific areas of investment based on the new round include:

• Delivering more features, like the recent release of Honeycomb Metrics, to make it easier for legacy APM users to consolidate tools and migrate to observability-based workflows.
• Customer programs that provide Honeycomb Enterprise at n****** through the remaining term of legacy APM contracts so teams can make the switch based on their technical and business needs, not on arbitrary fiscal timelines.
• Outreach programs that encompass education, community support, and generous pricing models for startups, students, and teams just getting started with observability.
• Further investments in Honeycomb’s distributions for OpenTelemetry, the open-source and vendor-agnostic observability standard for instrumenting, generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data.
• International expansion, spearheaded by former Pivotal, SignalFx, and Chef executive Andy Hawkins as the European regional director, to build on the success of fast-growing enterprise customers headquartered or with a strong presence in Europe, such as HelloFresh and Stripe.
• Growth in Honeycomb’s partner ecosystem and expanding successes like the AWS Marketplace and integrations, as well as toolchain partnerships with vendors like Cloudflare, LaunchDarkly, and CircleCI.

Some of the world’s most elite engineering teams use Honeycomb, and the company aims to bring these practices to all teams.

“We rely on Honeycomb to provide the world-class scale and resilience LaunchDarkly customers expect,” said Edith Harbaugh, LaunchDarkly co-founder and CEO. “With our feature management platform serving peaks of over 20 trillion feature flags, we use Honeycomb to quickly identify—before there is customer impact— the individual accounts or traffic patterns responsible for outliers. As a result, we have more confidence in production, and our customers have more confidence in LaunchDarkly.”