I’m excited to announce an extension to Netdata’s series A funding in the amount of $14.2M, bringing the total amount of funding to $31M. We’re thrilled to share the news; the additional funding will help us continue building the future of health monitoring and performance troubleshooting. In case you missed it, our mission is to redefine infrastructure monitoring. Our unique approach to building the right solution with and for the community is no easy task.
Building on an exceptional year of growth
The funding builds on the momentum we’ve seen with previous rounds, specifically, Netdata’s series A round in 2019 and the increasing growth adoption of the open-source Netdata Agent and the new Netdata Cloud. Netdata Cloud, released earlier this year, builds on the Agent as a cloud-based console for streamlining monitoring and troubleshooting infrastructure-wide.Despite the macroeconomic uncertainty due to COVID-19, we saw extremely strong interest from investors based on our fundamentals, building on the momentum we’ve seen with previous rounds. We’ve demonstrated strong product-market fit with our target audience of developers and IT professionals. Our solution is one of the most popular open-source applications, as shown by nearly 1M daily downloads via DockerHub and approaching 50k GitHub stars, making it very attractive to investors.
Netdata and Bessemer Venture Partners
Bessemer Venture Partners was ultimately selected to lead this round with additional participation by previous investors such as BainCapital Ventures. Bessemer’s unique approach and closely aligned strategy gave us confidence in working together. A year ago, they found us via our open-source project. Bessemer analyzed Netdata’s public data and identified an approach for monetizing that would drive success. Within the initial meetings, Bessemer actually presented a business plan that was to a great degree similar to our own view for Netdata’s future; it was amazing!We’re somewhat different compared to most other startups. The virality of our open-source solution provides evidence that we can address the market horizontally with a bottoms-up approach. Many investors find it difficult to understand an open-source, freemium, go-to-market strategy. Bessemer not only endorsed it, they suggested it. Needless to say, Bessemer offers not only capital but strategic alignment and advisory that will help continue increasing Netdata’s growth. We’re very excited to work together.
Investing in people and technology
With the new cash infusion, we’ll be investing in continuing to build a team with the vision of creating the best IT monitoring solution in the world. This year, we’ve added key executive hires to help develop our go-to-market plan (CMO Amy Abatangle and CFO Dimitris Protogirou), as well as added to our engineering and product teams. The funding is an opportunity for us to continue focusing on these teams, which are core to our progress and success.Netdata present and future
Our current focus is to continue to develop Netdata Cloud and provide out-of-the-box infrastructure monitoring. This extension of our series A provides enough runway for us to focus solely on our product, not more fundraising right now.Our goal today remains to be the best single-node, open-source monitoring system available today for anyone, anywhere, for free. We love open source and believe it’s one of the major breakthroughs of our time, which is why the Netdata Agent will always be open-source and free, our gift to the world.
We understand that the world needs more than single-node monitoring. So, we are now creating Netdata Cloud, a SaaS solution that connects to all your Netdata Agents and provides infrastructure monitoring, as a whole, while maintaining the same principles as the Netdata Agent. Netdata Cloud is also real-time, highly interactive, visualizes all the metrics in a meaningful way, requires minimal configuration and provides rapid results.
We understand that the best way to build such a SaaS solution is to get help from our users and the huge community around the Netdata Agent, which is why we have decided to offer Netdata Cloud for free to everyone.
Although Netdata as a company is building monitoring solutions, all the monitoring we provide is offered for free to everyone. We plan to offer a paid plan on top of the free offerings, providing advanced user security and auditing, increased data retention and enterprise plugins. We have a lot in the works and are excited to bring all this great functionality to the market, but our goal is to provide most of it for free, forever, and for everyone.