TechStrong TV & Chronosphere talk $43M series B, rapid growth, and observability

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:

• How Chronosphere came to be (started May 2019).
• Challenges our cloud-native monitoring product solves.
• Plans for our $43 million series B round (total $55 million in funding).
• Our rapid growth (employees and customers).
• What it means to be cloud-native.
• What types of organizations benefit from Chronosphere.
• When it’s time to migrate from open source monitoring tools to a SaaS solution like Chronosphere.
• What is observability.

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.