Instana, an application performance management (APM) platform for dynamic applications deployed in the enterprise, has raised $30 million in a series C round of funding led by Meritech Capital, with participation from its series B lead investor, Accel.
Founded in 2015, Instana offers enterprises automated APM services that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor their infrastructure and application performance. It maps the various components and interactions between applications and servers and spots anomalies in performance, throughput, error rates, and other issues when they occur.
Instana had previously raised $27 million in funding, and with another $30 million in the bank the company plans to grow its product offering and expand into more international markets.
Above: Instana application performance summary dashboard showing key performance indicators, slowest services, and processing time per application layer-1
Monitors
Instana nestles in an industry that counts the likes of publicly listed New Relic and AppDynamics, the latter of which was snapped up by Cisco for $3.7 billion ahead of a planned IPO in 2017. Elsewhere, another player in the APM space, Dynatrace, is reportedly mulling an IPO or a sale. So there are some big APM players out there already, but Instana posits that its next-gen APM platform, which it refers to as APM 3.0, is “built for the modern software organization.”
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“Technologically and organizationally, Instana is well positioned to be the leader of the APM 3.0,” said Instana cofounder and COO Pete Abrams. “The high rate of change of modern applications demands a new level of automation to ‘keep up’ with the continuous delivery of new code. Instana continuously and automatically discovers, maps, and monitors all hosts and apps, whether they are bare metal, virtual machines, or containers.”
Instana counts 120 employees at its two main hubs — its headquarters are in San Mateo, California, while its main engineering office is located in Solingen, Germany, where the company was originally hatched.
Nabbing Meritech as a lead investor is a notable coup for Instana, given Meritech’s impressive portfolio of companies. In the public realm, Meritech has invested in Facebook, Salesforce, (and Salesforce’s recent acquisition MuleSoft), Snap, Cloudera, and Box, while in the private realm it has also invested in Instana rival Datadog, Evernote, and Pokémon Go developer Niantic. A diverse range of companies, sure, but there are more than enough cloud- and enterprise-focused success stories there for Instana to enjoy some good company.
“Monitoring containerized microservice applications has become a critical requirement for today’s digital enterprises,” added Meritech Capital’s Alex Kurland. “Instana is packed with industry veterans who understand the APM industry, as well as the paradigm shifts now occurring in agile software development. Meritech is excited to partner with Instana as they continue to disrupt one of the largest and most important markets with their automated APM experience.”
