Today we shared the news that Chronosphere raised $115 million in an additional Series C round, bringing our total funding to $343 million and increasing valuation to $1.6 billion. Of course this would be welcome news for any hyper growth company, especially in this tight funding market. But for us at Chronosphere, it’s more than just a capital investment. It’s a show of confidence. A mere 14 months after our initial $200 million in Series C funding round, our existing investors doubled down and two new investors came on board.
Long story, short: this latest, massive funding round says Chronosphere has the brightest of futures. It’s the kind of company employees want to join and the kind of company customers can trust to solve their toughest challenges.
We wouldn’t be where we are today without our customers. Robinhood, Snap, Astronomer, DoorDash, Zillow, and Visa are among our fast-growing list of customers and we are extremely grateful for every one of them.
Our team works tirelessly to be able to provide our customers with proven industry leading reliability and effectiveness – having never broken our 99.9% SLA guarantee while reducing their number of severe incidents by 75%!
Our customers are also significantly reducing their costs when switching over from their incumbent solutions — according to a recent Total Economic Impact™(TEI) study from Forrester, an average Chronosphere customer receives $7.9M in total business value over three years with a payback period of less than 6 months. We published the ROI calculator so you can see for yourself how Chronosphere can help your company. As you can imagine, this combination of a more performant and reliable observability solution at a lower cost is resonating with lots of companies in the current economic climate.
A massive funding round and a rapidly growing customer base is great news to share, and tells us we’re heading in the right direction. But we’re also focused on achieving our goals while building a best-in-class company. There’s no greater affirmation of this than winning culture awards that are voted on by your employees (Comparably collects anonymous employee “sentiment ratings” over a 12-month period to determine results for its annual awards.)
Comparably named us “Best” in four categories: Best Company for Women, Best Company for Diversity, Best Company Culture, and Best CEO.
From day one, Chronosphere has prioritized diversity and inclusion. We believe the more diverse your organization is, the more productive, happy, and innovative your employees will be. It’s been challenging to grow our workforce tenfold in the space of three years, without wavering on this commitment to DEI. The awards for Best Company for Women and Best Company for Diversity demonstrate that our employees think we are doing a pretty good job. I couldn’t be more pleased.
From day one, my co-founder Rob Skillington and I envisioned Chronosphere as a company that would be a place where people want to work. A place where people would love showing up every day and where they would give it their all. Winning Comparably’s Best Culture and Best CEO awards tells me we’re on the right track. And it tells me our corporate values (no egos, trust & transparency, enduring camaraderie & care, reliability & responsibility, nothing is impossible) are ringing true.
We are extremely grateful that our investors continue to be not only bullish on our observability platform, but bullish on us. Our newest investors working with us include Sangeen Zeb who is a Partner at GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Divya Sudhakar from Geodesic Capital. And we are extremely pleased that all existing Chronosphere investors doubled-down, including: Brandon Reeves from Lux Capital, Anton Levy from General Atlantic, Jerry Chen from Greylock Partners, and Lee Fixel from Addition. Last round we started working with Brian Singerman from Founders Fund and Kim Moore from Glynn Capital, and we are excited to welcome them back as well.
I’ll let you in on a secret. Our investors are part of the Chronosphere team. They are there on the front lines with us, actively helping our company grow and succeed. A great example is how one of our newest investors — GV Partner, Sangeen — helped us find many of the GTM executives who recently joined Chronosphere. Existing investors are always helping too, whether it’s working the phones or joining me in an interview on TheCube.
Our investors are unique and we appreciate their support immensely.
We are day-ten of the new year and there will be much more news to come from us over the next 11 ½ months and beyond. I don’t know the details yet, because my crystal ball isn’t that good. But I know everything will be exciting and I look forward to sharing.
You might remember a blog that I wrote just a few months ago on our exciting recognition from Comparably on Best Perks and Benefits, alongside Otta’s Rocket List 2022.
Founded in 2019, Chronosphere is a remote-first company built by engineers, for engineers. We are a leading cloud native observability platform aimed at putting engineers back in the driver’s seat to seamlessly navigate cloud native complexity.
In the past year, we’ve achieved some pretty amazing things: like tripling our team, adding key executive leaders, and retaining 100% of our valued customers. At this year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon we announced our latest launch of the Chronosphere platform which continues to disrupt legacy solutions that we think provide too little, too late for too much out of pocket. Needless to say, we’re on a mission to change the observability world, and it starts with our people.
In October, we saw two awards as a result of our great culture. Today, we couldn’t be prouder to add four more awards to the list including:
🏆Best CEO
🏆Best Company Culture
🏆Best Company for Women
🏆Best Company for Diversity
What do these awards say? These Comparably awards speak to the special culture that we’ve cultivated together, and our leadership that takes us to the next level.
Let’s take a dive into what each award means.
Comparably released their 6th annual list of Best CEOs, based on anonymous employee ratings over a 12 month period. The final rankings were determined from sample questions and approval metrics of CEOs. We were ecstatic (but not surprised) to see none other than our trailblazing CEO, Martin Mao, grinning in 1st place on the small/mid-size companies list!
Martin leveraged his success at Uber, where he and future co-founder and our CTO, Rob Skillington worked on an open-source observability tooling (M3!). It provided Uber with the power of a scalable, remote storage time series database. With “uber” relevant experience under their belt they founded Chronosphere, as a people-first company with a passion to develop great, mission critical products.
At any company, the cultural mindset starts with its leadership and in particular the CEO. Martin believes — and it’s echoed throughout the leadership team — that transparent, people-first leadership is key to the success of every teammate. With the important pass-along effect of enduring camaraderie and care (amongst the rest of our values), we feel unstoppable in our mission and solutions.
See Martin’s leadership in action in this video from our company-wide third birthday celebration!
Comparably’s company culture rankings were determined on 20 core culture metrics — from compensation to career growth and leadership. Chronosphere came out with an A+ rating across the board — with the majority of voters noting that they truly look forward to interacting with their teammates (+1 to that. I mean, our team is pretty great.)
We believe in a work environment where all Chronospherians can thrive. Although our headcount has rapidly expanded we work to maintain a culture of trust and transparency. We think it helps make us collaborative, innovative, and successful in all of our endeavors — from teams down to the individual.
At Chronosphere, we offer an extensive list of global perks and benefits – to support our people, such as gender affirmation spending accounts. And, we’re always finding different ways for Chronospherians to connect — whether that be over free lunches, at monthly hub events, or even global, company-wide trips at exciting destinations!
How about the award for best company for women? Yep – we’re on that list too. Chronosphere actually ranks in the top 5% of companies for our “Gender Score”, which measures how female employees rate their experience across multiple dimensions.
This “Best company for women” award reinforces our commitment to our continued efforts in creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive work environment for all female-identifying teammates; especially in a famously male-dominated industry. For example, while the engineering org increased by 54%, we increased the number of female identifying engineers by 325%.
The Chronosphere team also expands inclusivity efforts outside of the company, like partnering with Girls Who Code, the largest pipeline of future female engineers.
Finally, check us out on the list for Best Company for Diversity. Small tech companies with less than 1,000 people actually hold the largest female employee ratio, with 30.2% – according to this FinancesOnline article. We’ve bested this number. With approximately 250 employees, we’ve achieved greater parity with no single gender comprising more than 65% of our workforce.
But, we are going further. For instance, you can see the average employment trends in tech in this special report by the EEOC, which highlights minority employment disparity in the tech industry. We aim to do better. Much better.
As part of our Q3 DEI goals, Chronosphere has pledged and achieved to ensure greater diversity across the organization where no single ethnicity would make up more than 55% of the team.
What does Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Chronosphere look like?
The presence of difference.
It’s about taking intentional steps to establish mutual respect, understanding, and recognition for our unique qualities and experiences. We start with our hiring practices: further exposure to our role with job boards, asking for resumes to be blinded by candidates, and tracking efforts through DEI surveys.
Treating everyone the same.
We aim to meet people where they are, so that all teammates have an equal opportunity to be successful. We look at our practices and policies for this. How we think about compensation, and onboarding a Head of Total Rewards are a few ways we make sure people feel valued.
Creating an environment where everyone feels respected and connected to one another.
We practice inclusion at Chronosphere by seeking various ways for team members to not just feel invited to the party but feel part of it, too. This means in-person events and virtual events to acknowledge levels of comfort, sponsored meetings and work locations, and pulling in multi-level and multi-background individuals.
One of our priorities in 2023 is to have DEI innate to who we are — with DEI awareness events internally, alongside continued efforts to diversify the candidate pipeline. For FY24, we hope to launch at least two additional employee resource groups.
And stay tuned – we aim to release our first annual DEI report in March of 2023!
You can check out all of our latest happenings here!
As always, we’d love to hear from you.
Happy 2023!
The world is a heavy place right now. It’s impossible to look away from the escalating crisis in Ukraine, as we grapple with ways to assist from near and far. With one of Chronosphere’s three hubs located in the neighboring Republic of Lithuania, and because some of our team members are Ukrainian, we stand especially strong with the people of Ukraine. Chronosphere is rallying as a company to offer support in whatever way we can, ranging from organizing company-matched donations (raising more than $18K between our ~140 employees and company match) to listening to advice from Ukrainian teammates about trusted news sources.
At times like these we draw strength from past struggles to make the world a better place. In that spirit, this year’s International Women’s Day (IWD) was especially empowering. This year’s IWD “Break the Bias” theme was centered around raising awareness against bias that enables one gender to dominate over the other. Gender bias is especially challenging in the tech space, where women strive for equal pay, opportunities, development, and mentorship in roles – from technical to sales to marketing and beyond – historically held by men.
In the gender-equal world envisioned by IWD organizers, the world is “free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination” and differences are valued and celebrated.
At Chronosphere, we couldn’t agree more! Creating a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is a priority that we work towards every day – which we were thrilled to discuss at a special IWD event held this week for a group of women in tech and allies. In honor of IWD’s Break the Bias theme, we gathered together to share a meal, meet new people, and talk about workplace experiences and challenges. Below I walk through the details and share some fun photos from the day.
Our International Women’s Day event took place Monday March 7 and was our first of what will be many community-based events to come. More than 50 people joined in on the conversation, including our co-founders, Martin Mao (CEO) and Rob Skillington (CTO), as well as leaders and team members from across the company – from engineering to marketing to sales.
There were two sessions for our attendees to choose from: one track focused on tech and one focused on marketing. During these sessions, guest speakers from Chronosphere weighed in on how they became the leaders and contributors in tech that they are today. They walked through personal and professional stories that were illustrated with photos and provided a deep sense of “who” makes up Chronosphere’s workforce.
In addition to providing guests with good food and dialogue, they were also given the opportunity to vote on one of two organizations – Voices of Children and Girls Who Code – geared toward helping others and advancing women in tech. The winner would receive a $5K donation from Chronosphere. Scroll on down to find out which organization won the vote (spoiler – both!)
Kicking things off, Chronosphere’s Technical Recruiting Manager, Natalie Pau, (Chronosphere’s first recruiter) touched on the variety of backgrounds that make up our vibrant team, and introduced the speakers of this event:
“One of the reasons I decided to join Chronosphere was seeing the clear mission to build a diverse team. I remember reading a TechCrunch article when Chronosphere first raised its Series B funding. Martin said DEI was a key focal point here and wanted to make sure they were building a diverse, inclusive foundational team – from the ground up. Now, we want to make sure we’re supporting the next wave of female engineers out there.”
In an effort to cultivate a safe and supportive environment for women in tech, Natalie mentioned our #chronogals Slack channel – an inclusive space for our teammates to engage in open dialogue.
Following Natalie’s intro, Martin painted a picture of Chronosphere, sharing the journey of how the company came to be.
Martin went on to underscore Chronosphere’s ground-up plan to build a culture of DEI.
Martin captured Chronosphere’s guiding values when he said: “We founded this company with a principal that we have continued to stick by – and that’s building a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion. In building a diverse workforce, we have a component of awareness and intent to solve a problem.”
Martin also noted, “When we look at the low numbers of women entering this industry, the numbers drop further in leadership roles. That’s why we’re looking to implement awareness programs throughout the company.” Martin mentions that this will take shape in a few ways:
After intros from Natalie and Martin, we all went into one of two breakout rooms where guest speakers from Chronosphere’s marketing and tech teams shared their experiences as women in tech.
Our engineering team is growing rapidly, and women are increasingly powering that growth – and challenging the status-quo of a normally male dominated industry. Elenore kicked off the tech track breakout session, highlighting how to use networking to get more opportunities: “I used my social time to network with my peers. And, I actually became really good at ping pong.”
Elenore also mentioned how many women today have to work around the “Prove-It Again” bias: “A lot of times, women find themselves having to prove themselves on skill sets, while men are assumed to be capable. Men are given the benefit of the doubt, and women are judged strictly by what they’ve accomplished.”
Elenore brought up the importance of receiving stretch assignments – which are projects that are generally outside of one’s skill set: “So, how do you get those stretch assignments? Through networking and sponsorship. We naturally socialize and network with people like us. This just means we have to take deliberate action to Break the Bias. She offered a few tips:
Claire touched on her past experience in a less diverse workplace and her experience as a mom in the tech world:
“I started my career in advertising, which wasn’t exactly like Mad Men, but it had similar characteristics. I realized that bias mainly comes from lack of knowledge and experience. Once I moved into tech and became a mom, I battled between wanting to be a super-mom, and feeling guilty that I wasn’t doing enough. But part of success is learning how to communicate what you need and want. You don’t have to do it all.”
Claire then shared with us a fragment of an empowering article: Why Being A Mom is Enough.
Gibbs gave attendees an overview of her unlikely transition from being an art history major, to a Product Manager at AWS (Amazon Web Services).
“After the five-year mark (with Amazon), I started to think about other opportunities outside of the company. When a recruiter from Chronosphere reached out, I was really excited. I joined as a Developer Advocate, which is a role that we built based off of my strengths. Recently, I moved into my new position as a Product Marketing Manager. I think it’s very cool and exciting that Chronosphere offers the opportunity to try different avenues.”
Gibbs shared three key pieces of wisdom that she’s learned during her career in tech:
Gibbs handed it over to Rachel, who coincidentally also studied art history and also double majored in computer science. Rachel dove into the timeline of her career in tech – from the old boys club of being a Principal Analyst at Forrester to her current role as Chronosphere’s Head of Product and Technical Marketing – and what she learned while overcoming obstacles (both personally and professionally) throughout her career:
“The first thing that I always come back to as a leader, manager, peer and employee – is that we are humans first, and we are people first. I never want to work for an organization that loses sight of that. The well-being of the person that works with me is the single most important thing.”
Attendees were able to vote on the organization that would receive our IWD event’s $5K donation. Voices of Children, a far-reaching organization that will assist children in Ukraine, won the vote – but we didn’t stop there. As a surprise, Chronosphere pledged to additionally donate $5K to Girls Who Code. Also, Martin and Rob each personally matched Chronosphere’s donation, bringing the total to $10K for each organization.
Other ways Chronosphere contributes:
We ended our International Women’s Day event with a few minutes of Q&A from guests that joined us. We enjoyed thoughtful dialogue from different backgrounds, found renewed commitment and inspiration from one another, and came together to learn more about each other’s experiences. Breaking the bias is not a one-day feat accomplished in celebration of women, but rather something that we, as a company, strive for on a regular basis – within our teams, within our personal lives, and more importantly, within our community.
Want to keep up with the latest at Chronosphere, and stay tuned for more events? Follow us on Twitter @chronosphereio and check out our blogs on our site.
Today we shared monster news that Chronosphere raised $200 million in Series C funding and now, as a privately held startup valued at over $1 billion, we’ve achieved unicorn status. I am beyond proud of the work our team has done to reach this milestone, and beyond excited for what’s still to come.
You may be asking yourself – why is Martin still writing? What more is there to say on the topic?? Lately it seems like there’s a unicorn born almost every day … no big deal.
True – if you make the mistake of judging a unicorn based on valuation alone.
Chronosphere is a rare kind of unicorn because of how we got here. That may sound like a parental boast, so I have summed up a few reasons why Chronosphere’s unicorn status is unique, and why there’s more to our story than a $1 billion-plus valuation.
A mere two years ago, Chronosphere was still in stealth mode and it was just my co-founder, Rob Skillington, and me working pandemic-style. I was huddled in the laundry room of my condo, and Rob was working from a desk tucked into a corner of his living room. Blink – Chronosphere is a unicorn. Going from zero to unicorn status in 2.3 years, this is rare. In fact, according to Pitchbook, Chronosphere is now in the top 10 fastest B2B SaaS unicorns. EVER.
We reached unicorn level with a team of only 80 people, most of whom joined during the past year … and in the midst of a pandemic. The textbook term for a unicorn team this size is “tiny.” Small as it is, the team of 80 is world class, which has made it possible to reach this milestone, and as fast as we did. The good news is, we are growing rapidly, and expect to surpass 110 Chronospherians by year’s end – this means we are hiring! Chronosphere prides itself on providing an inclusive, positive, learning environment – please check out our careers page for a role that fits you and come join the team.
Last month we shared the news that Chronosphere’s multi-million dollar ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) grew by 9x so far in 2021, and that we are doing 6- and 7-figure deals. This means Chronosphere’s unicorn status happened on the back of record-breaking ARR growth.
As noisy as the unicorn news has been, the reality is only a handful of companies ever get to this stage. According to AngelList, a venture-backed, seed-stage startup only has an estimated 1 in 40 (or 2.5%!) shot of becoming a unicorn today.
How many of those companies can prove that their $billion valuation is more than perception? Chronosphere can. At a little more than two years old, we are already showing momentum, and our velocity is backed by real business numbers. Yet another reason why we are a special kind of unicorn.
With our Series C funding, we have raised a total of $255 million. It is a great sign for us that all of our existing investors decided to double-down on us with Anton Levy from General Atlantic leading the round. We’re looking forward to the continued support by Jerry Chen from Greylock Partners, Brandon Reeves from Lux Capital, and Lee Fixel from Addition. We’re equally as excited to start working with Brian Singerman from Founders Fund, Yasmin Razavi from Spark Capital, and Kim Moore from Glynn Capital.
Chronosphere still has most of our previous capital on hand. If we wanted to grow at a healthy rate that was slower – but more typical of the olden days (aka 2 years ago) – we could have continued on, status quo, without a Series C round.
But that’s not our reality. Chronosphere has been executing on record growth, which demonstrates how differentiated the product we offer really is. It also demonstrates overall market demand for a true Observability platform as more companies adopt cloud-native architecture. This means that we need to grow even faster next year, and the funding will continue to help us:
For a glimpse into Chronosphere’s laser-focused growth plans, look no further than today’s distributed tracing announcement. With support for distributed tracing and root-cause capabilities, we are taking a giant step forward on the three phases of observability.
There’s plenty more to do in observability, and we are just getting started. But rest assured, we are doubling down on more product enhancements next year – we’ll be rolling out capabilities at a faster pace, and being a unicorn is the surest way for us to get there.
I still beam into our company All Hands from the laundry room on occasion. Our remote-first work / lifestyle continues, so it’s both a necessity and for kicks. I’ll admit … I kind of look forward to someday streaming into the NASDAQ with those front loaders behind me.
Halfway through 2021, we’ve been able to talk to a lot of industry folks about the exciting things happening here at Chronosphere. One of those great conversations was with Alan Shimel from TechStrong TV. Our CEO and co-founder, Martin Mao, sat down with Alan at a time when we had a lot of news to share: It was February 2021, and we had just announced the general availability of our monitoring product and $43.4 million in series B funding led by investors Greylock Partners and Lux Capital, and venture capitalist, Lee Fixel, with participation from new investor, General Atlantic. We were also on our way to double digit workforce growth (Martin talks in more detail about Chronosphere’s origins, our culture, and rapid growth in his blog commemorating Chronosphere’s two year anniversary).
Martin and Alan – who last spoke (in person!) at KubeCon 2019 – covered a range of topics that helped introduce Chronosphere to those still unfamiliar, such as:
You can watch the 29-minute video to hear Alan and Martin in their own voices. In the meantime, here are a couple of highlights from their chat:
AS: Chronosphere is a company I’m somewhat familiar with, but a lot of our audience may not be. Give us a little bit of the Chronosphere story, and weave in how you came to co-found it.
MM: At Chronosphere we provide a hosted monitoring solution purpose-built for cloud-native environments. Monitoring has been around forever and cloud-native is just as critical, if not more critical, as it was before. The thing you are monitoring has now fundamentally changed as part of this shift to Kubernetes and microservices. Now we’re monitoring very dynamic, nimble microservices. That’s created a need for a new tool that’s purpose-built to monitor these environments as opposed to legacy ones.
As for my past, before I co-founded Chronosphere [with CTO Rob Skillington] I was leading the core observability team at Uber where we were very early adopters of cloud-native technologies. We experienced first-hand the difficulties of monitoring these particular environments. We actually built open source tooling to solve these problems for ourselves at Uber. A couple of years ago, Rob and I decided to leave Uber and start a company and build on top of this open source tooling that we had developed. We created what is today known as Chronosphere.
Tune in to catch the rest.
