Observability Market Creator Honeycomb Nabs $50M in Rare Series D Funding as Economy Fuels Its Growth

Increasingly complex cloud environments, demand for high-quality code, and economic turmoil fuel market need for observability and record growth at Honeycomb

SAN FRANCISCO, April 6, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Honeycomb, a leading observability platform used by high-performing engineering teams to investigate the behavior of cloud applications, today announced it has raised $50 million in Series D funding. Headline leads the round with participation from other existing investors, Insight Partners and Scale Venture Partners. This round brings the total capital raised to nearly $150 million, including customer angel investments from HelloFresh CEO Dominik Richter and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch.

The new funding adds to the company's momentum in 2022 when it achieved another consecutive year of 2x revenue growth and drove over 160% net revenue retention for 600+ customers globally. Honeycomb also released its O'Reilly Book, "Observability Engineering," and was named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for APM and Observability.

Adding to this momentum, Honeycomb also chalked up recent key customer wins with Robinhood, Moov, Frasers Group, and Equinix, who all join a growing list of customers like Vanguard, Slack, and Vercel. In addition, Kelly Watkins, former VP of Global Marketing at Slack and CEO of Abstract, has joined the Board of Directors.

"Delivering effective observability is now a strategic imperative for software teams in all industry sectors," said James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk. "Honeycomb created the category by relentlessly focusing on establishing a better model and platform for managing and troubleshooting modern distributed systems, by engineers, for engineers."

As organizations face turbulent economic headwinds, engineering teams are expected to do more with less. The unprecedented pressure to innovate and release new features faster is compounded by stringent end-user expectations and increasingly complex tech stacks. As a result, modern engineering teams can no longer rely on "good enough" legacy APM tools built for predictable, monolithic systems and aren't architected for today's complex and unpredictable distributed cloud environments. Honeycomb is the only observability platform to entirely sidestep the data correlation problem across logs, metrics, and traces, by uniquely architecting its datastore to be datatype agnostic.

"High-performance engineering teams need accessible, intuitive observability workflows. While our competition is busy rearchitecting their data stores, we're once again leading the pack by delivering innovative, developer-centric features that scale the power of knowledge across teams," said Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb. "Too often, a prospect using a traditional APM tool comes through our door after being slapped with surprise overage bills or frustrations regarding incident visibility. Organizations should never be subjected to gaps in visibility just to save on cost—Honeycomb makes good on that promise."

Today, how code is written and intended to be used often differs from reality. End-users have varied environments and dynamic use cases for software, creating unpredictable bugs and anomalies. The ability to analyze high-cardinality data is crucial to discover novel problems. Honeycomb gives engineering teams the power to detect patterns in seconds across billions of data points representing how users are experiencing their code in real time. It never aggregates or discards data.

"Software is the genetic makeup of our modern global society. We rely on it for everything—so if your apps and services aren't performing how they were intended to, users will leave them to find ones that work," explains Thomas Gieselmann, Founding Partner at Headline. "This makes the mission and value that Honeycomb's observability platform provides to engineering teams business-critical, and we couldn't be more thrilled to help them scale to win big on a global level."

The funding will propel Honeycomb's expansion across geographies, its contributions and significant support for OpenTelemetry, and efforts toward building a cohesive integration strategy across the entire software development ecosystem. To learn more about Honeycomb's funding news, be sure to read CEO Christine Yen's blog post.

About Honeycomb
Honeycomb provides observability for high-performing engineering teams so they can quickly understand what their code does in the hands of real users in unpredictable and highly complex cloud environments. Honeycomb customers stop wasting precious time on engineering mysteries because they can quickly solve them and know exactly how to create fast, reliable, and great customer experiences. HelloFresh, Stripe, Slack, Fender, Vanguard, LaunchDarkly, and many more rely on Honeycomb for fast incident response, performance optimization, and safely accelerating release cycles. Learn more at www.honeycomb.io and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Headline 
Headline is a global venture capital firm with teams on the ground in 7 cities around the world. Using its own technology, Headline discovers and invests in rising founders across B2B and B2C. With $4B in assets under management, Headline is composed of a network of four regionally-focused early stage funds in the US, Europe, Brazil, and Asia as well as a Global Venture Growth fund that invests internationally. Since its founding in 1998, Headline has worked alongside founders with global aspirations from Silicon Valley to São Paulo, Beijing to Berlin. Its portfolio includes category leaders such as Acorns, Angi, AppFolio, Bumble, Creditas, Farfetch, Gopuff, Honeycomb, Pismo, The RealReal, Scopely, Segment, SEMrush, SonosYeahka, among others. Learn more at Headline.com.  

Media Contact
Harrison Calato, Senior Corporate Communications Manager
(E): harrisoncalato@honeycomb.io