I’m delighted to announce that Honeycomb has raised $20M in Series B funding, led by e.ventures Growth, with participation from existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Storm Ventures, Next World Capital, and Merian Ventures, and joined by Industry Ventures. Honeycomb has led the conversation and momentum behind observability for years, and now we’re poised to scale the product, community, and practice even further.
That additional funding accelerates our ability to give software engineering teams the observability they need to eliminate toil and delight their users. More functionality, more polish, more problems solved—we’re ready to keep pushing the bounds and continue defining the future of observability.
What this means for you, our customers and community
Most immediately, this funding round will allow us to invest in R&D to further develop the modern observability tools that engineering teams need to build reliable production software. (By the way, we’re hiring!)
In the last year, we’ve worked with you, our customers and community, to deliver the features that matter most. With support for Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Honeycomb becoming SOC 2 Type II certified, and our patented Secure Tenancy approach to data privacy, we’re now able to help a broader range of engineering teams focus on core business problems. We’re going to keep innovating with you to build even more value on top of a true observability solution—one that was built from Day 1 to handle high-cardinality with lightning-fast performance to help you find any needle of a problem, no matter how deeply buried it is in your production haystack.
We’re also going to keep pushing our charge to make observability more accessible to everyone. Over the past year, we made Honeycomb free for everyone. We also radically simplifed our pricing model to include unlimited users, unlimited services, unlimited storage, and 60-day retention across all plans, making it trivially easy to scale Honeycomb to your team’s needs while eliminating guesswork. We also made engineering and governance investments in OpenTelemetry, an open-source ecosystem initiative ushering in a new industry standard for application instrumentation. We believe that a strong, vendor-agnostic instrumentation standard is the best way to build a thriving ecosystem. That gives you flexibility to choose a product that’s right for you and it allows us to more clearly show you our differentiators.
Supporting you, our community, as you navigate through your various observability journeys is an essential (and eagerly anticipated) part of our next stage of growth. Thanks for joining us on this ride—it’s going to keep getting even better!
A journey years in the making
Years ago, when Honeycomb first introduced the world to observability, we received more than our fair share of raised eyebrows, hesitation, and doubt. Honeycomb wasn’t another log aggregator, monitoring tool, or dead-simple APM. Many didn’t understand why we weren’t building in the direction of these existing tools and instead built toward an undefined and potentially bespoke future. We did it because we knew—at our very core—that engineers needed a new breed of tooling if we were all, as an industry, going to be ready to deal with the future of software.
And look where we are today: Industry leaders have embraced observability as an active exploration of software systems, clearly distinct from monitoring. Respected analysts credit Honeycomb for driving the rise of a “guiding principle for application development and service management.” Everybody’s jumping aboard the bandwagon, trying “observability” nametags on for size and spreading some FUD along the way.
So we continue to define what observability means as a practice by working in tandem with you, our community, to understand the adoption patterns that really work. In this past year, we developed a series of guideposts to help teams in any organization understand how to uplevel their observability practices. When we asked about your journeys, you were willing to share with us, and we compiled that into the industry’s first report reflecting the observability landscape.
We’ve always been at the forefront of bringing observability into the future. With this new investment, you can be certain that we’ll continue to define what observability means and where it will go next.
Thank you to our investors and customers for joining us and seeing observability as the monumental paradigm shift that it is. We look forward to continuing to make Honeycomb powerful, intuitive, and accessible to everyone. We’re thrilled to help build a thriving ecosystem around observability for users and vendors alike. And we’re excited to take those next steps with you.
Try Honeycomb for free today to join the party. Guess less. Know more.
P.S. Did I mention that we’re hiring?
