Investors Throw Datadog A $31M Bone

Datadog, a cloud service that helps customers monitor infrastructure and software, whether all in the cloud or a hybrid on-premises-cloud environment, announced $31M in Series C funding today.
The round was led by Index Ventures with help from RTP Ventures, Openview Partners and what they referred to as “other equity holders.” Index helped fund the Series B round last February, and RTP has been involved since seed funding in April, 2011.
The $31M brings the total raised to $53.4M.
Datadog, which launched in 2011 and produced its first product in 2013, provides a dashboard of data about any cloud services that can plug into the system. It can work with several popular services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine.
CEO and co-founder Olivier Pomel, says they work with clients to expose the information that’s most important to them based on each customer’s priorities. He explained that his company’s roughly 1,000 customers range from smaller organizations to companies monitoring tens of thousands of instances and they need to be able to scale for the largest company.
He says while some customers are all cloud, he has seen many who are in transition and Pomel says that this hybrid state is growing more common all the time, at a much more accelerated rate than he had anticipated.
What’s more, there are new technologies like Docker and CoreOS coming all the time and his company needs to be able to help developers and operations manage this changing environment.

That’s where the new money comes in. In addition to ramping up sales and marketing as you would expect, the company is also looking to beef up its research and development, and is hoping to add new services to the dashboard over the next year to increase the number it can monitor.
As that happens, Pomel says, they want to layer on more sophisticated analytics on top of the data the service is collecting. “As customers mature on our platform, they can do more sophisticated treatment of data,” he explained. That could allow them to start looking at things like predictive analytics and anomaly detection.
Since there is so much data, Pomel says they aggregate the information and present it in a way that makes sense to the customer. As they collect all of this data, they are building a detailed record of activity across the network and in the cloud. Pomel says customers could also use this data to do forensic investigation into issues that might have cropped up around performance. Armed with this knowledge, they can take steps to prevent slow-downs or outages in the future.
Datadog plans to triple its current 75 employee work force over the next year, something it already achieved over the last year, growing from just 25 employees at the start of 2014.
The company’s headquarters are in New York City with a sales office in Boston.