Looking to expand its ranks and deepen the development of its technology, Datadog, based in New York, raised $31 million in a Series C funding round led by Index Ventures, with RTP Ventures, OpenView Partners, and others participating.
Datadog is a monitoring service used by IT teams and developers who work with cloud-based software. CEO Olivier Pomel says the company’s sweet spot is customers with apps used on a large scale that produce vast amounts of data. Some of Datadog’s clients include Spotify, Lonely Planet, and Facebook.
Pomel says many of his company’s customers are businesses that want to shift away from their legacy IT systems. “We see companies, big and small, transitioning part or all of their infrastructure to a public or private cloud,” he says.
Datadog provides monitoring and analytics services during such moves and continues working with the companies afterwards, says Pomel. “We sit on top of a massive amount of data from our customers about their infrastructure,” he says. “It opens up a lot of opportunities for us to give additional value to them in the long term.”
The cloud services sector is ripe for some changes, Pomel says. Amazon was an early leader, he says, and defined many aspects of the public cloud. “They own the market today,” he says. “Most of the people who are operating at scale on the cloud are on Amazon.”
That dominant position may be tested, he says, as competitors such as Google and Microsoft gain traction. He also sees options emerging in private cloud computing, particularly with software container technology on the rise from companies such as Docker.
The new funding for Datadog, Pomel says, will be used partly on new hires in engineering and marketing as well as investment in research and development. Datadog has a staff of 75, which he says has tripled in size since last year, and is looking to continue to grow at that pace including at its Boston office. The company previously raised $22 million, Pomel says, and its total funding to date is $53 million.
