Happy third birthday Chronosphere!

Before I kick off my blog about Chronosphere’s third anniversary—which we celebrated by gathering together for the first time in-person, in Puerto Rico!—and a rundown of our booming year-three, I need to set the scene.

A year ago this time, I was writing about how our second birthday capped an epic year of product building and about what would be the launch of today’s rocket ship momentum. In our second year, we announced general availability of our highly scalable observability product and we received a $43M Series B funding round. We also saw our workforce triple in the space of a year, and we were starting to solve observability challenges for huge customers like DoorDash.

We are a remote-first company, but we also strongly believe in safely getting together in-person when possible. However, this time last year, the pandemic was still keeping us working from home. I was beaming into our weekly All Hands meeting from the social-distancing safety of my laundry room as I walked our (then) sixty-person workforce through the huge milestones that show how far we’d come in such a short time.

There was no shortage of reasons to celebrate last year, and, based on rapid acceleration of cloud native adoption and rampant observability challenges that needed solving, it was obvious big things were to yet come…who knew it would be this big, this fast! I’ll sum it all up in my next annual “then-and-now” Chronoversary anniversary story.

Here we go:

As we ring in Chronosphere’s third year at a company-wide, in-person getaway in Puerto Rico, the focus is on how our early momentum fueled all avenues of company growth. In the last year, Chronosphere hit even bigger milestones, ranging from workforce size to product innovations to $250M in total funding to multi-million dollar annual recurring revenues (ARR) reaching 16x growth to our status as a unicorn to in-person gatherings in exotic lands.

Then: A year ago our collective heads were spinning about the fact that, despite the pandemic, our workforce had tripled in the space of a year. At the time, we had sixty Chronospherians distributed across ten U.S. states and three EU countries. We have our remote-first model to thank for allowing us to grow our workforce so quickly because it means we aren’t limited to hiring around physical hubs.

Today: We have once again more than tripled last year’s (then-tripled) workforce. You read that right: We are closing in on 200 employees spread across the globe and we now have three hub offices in New York, Seattle, and EU (Vilnius, Lithuania). Even as we continue a high-growth trajectory, we make a responsible and sustainable approach to hiring our priority.

Then: A year ago we were thrilled with our $43 million in Series B funding, which brought our then-total funding to $55 million. This critical funding provided the runway we needed to grow our company.

Now: Chronosphere has since raised an additional $200 million in Series C funding, bringing our total funding to $250M. And as a privately held startup valued at over $1 billion, we’ve achieved unicorn status at lightning speed. Becoming a unicorn in a little more than two years is so rare, Chronosphere was ranked in the top 10 fastest B2B SaaS unicorns, according to Pitchbook.

Then: We had more than doubled our revenue in the first quarter of 2021 alone and were rapidly onboarding new customers.

Now: In February 2022 we shared the news that our multi-million dollar ARR saw 16x growth in the past 12 months. As a result Chronosphere is on pace to be one of the fastest B2B SaaS companies to go from $1 million to $50 million in ARR, faster than well-known SaaS companies like Datadog, CrowdStrike, and Confluent.

Also, we significantly expanded our customer base and brought on two of the top five publicly traded fintech companies, including Robinhood. Meanwhile, our existing customers, like Abnormal Security and Doordash, continue to expand their usage.

Then: We had recently announced the general availability of our highly scalable, purpose-built for cloud native monitoring product.

Now: While metrics continue to be a leading component in observability practices, as systems have become more distributed, the need for tracing has become more apparent. The Chronosphere observability platform is now able to ingest distributed traces at scale, seamlessly integrated alongside with metrics, to more rapidly triage and understand the root cause of problems.

Then: All meetings were 100% via Zoom. ‘nuf said.

Now: As I post this blog, the fact that I’m no longer stuck in my laundry room, and instead celebrating Chronosphere’s third anniversary in Puerto Rico along with the rest of the Chronosphere team—in-person!!—says it all.

We hope to make fabulous company getaways like our trip to Puerto Rico a tradition, so if fun in-person gatherings and riding a rocket ship to success appeals to you, have a look at our open roles and come join the team.