The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Strategic decision · 2014–2019
Grafana Labs raises $24M to bet open source wins observability
Open-source Grafana Labs closes a $24M Series A in October 2019, betting an open, composable observability platform beats closed suites.
Grafana Labs
What the business is
Grafana Labs builds the open-source Grafana dashboard and an open, composable observability platform for logs, metrics and traces, selling Grafana Enterprise and a hosted Grafana Cloud around it.
Starting capital：$24M Series A announced on 2019-10-24; this material does not name the lead investor.
How it started
Grafana began as an open-source dashboard project created by Torkel, widely used to visualize Graphite and Prometheus metrics; users in the HN thread describe rolling it out across the Financial Times and fleets of robots. Grafana Labs was established around 2014 — the 2019 post says the company was founded five years earlier — to accelerate adoption of the Grafana project and build a sustainable business around it.
What happened
By October 2019 the company had expanded across the open-source observability stack, creating Metrictank (a Graphite-compatible time-series database) and Loki (log aggregation) and contributing heavily to Graphite, Prometheus and Cortex. On 2019-10-24 it announced a $24M Series A to invest further in that community, hiring a COO (Douglas Hanna), a VP of Global Sales (Dave Kranowitz) and a VP of Applications (Ryan McKinley, a leading community contributor), and pushing the vision of logs, metrics and traces in one open experience with Grafana at the center. Grafana engineers answered questions in the HN thread: more than half of engineering effort stays on Grafana core, Grafana Cloud is the hosted path, and easy self-hosting is a stated priority.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
Grafana Labs is the company behind the open-source Grafana dashboard project, and its bet is that observability can be an open, composable platform instead of a closed suite: logs, metrics and traces together in one experience, with Grafana at the center and every data source treated as first-class.
The project began with Grafana itself, an open-source dashboard created by Torkel and adopted widely for Graphite and Prometheus metrics; users in the thread describe deploying it across the Financial Times, fleets of robots and hundreds of dashboards. The company was established around 2014 to accelerate adoption of the Grafana project and build a sustainable business around it.
By October 2019 Grafana Labs had expanded across the open-source stack, creating Metrictank and Loki and contributing heavily to Graphite, Prometheus and Cortex. On 2019-10-24 it announced a $24M Series A — while saying it did not need to fundraise — framing the money as investment in the community and open-source projects, and hiring a COO, a VP of Global Sales and a VP of Applications.
The HN thread that day drew 293 points and 114 comments, with Grafana engineers answering product questions directly: more than half of engineering effort stays on Grafana core, Grafana Cloud is the hosted path, and self-hosting remains a priority. The round was an explicit wager that an open, composable observability platform with Grafana at the center would beat closed suites.
What has to be true
- The raise was a deliberate bet on openness: the company's own post says it did not need to fundraise and frames the $24M as investment in community and open-source projects, not a rescue.
- Neutrality was the wedge: Grafana treats Influx, MySQL, CloudWatch, Stackdriver, Elastic and Prometheus as equals, an 'un-vendor' approach that engineers in the thread credited for adoption.
- The audience signal was concrete: 293 points and 114 comments on Hacker News on 2019-10-24, with Grafana employees answering roadmap questions in the thread.
- The money went to visible commitments: hiring a COO, a VP of Global Sales and a VP of Applications from the community, plus continued investment in Grafana core, Loki, Cortex and Metrictank.
What can be applied
An open core is a moat when the vendor also treats rival backends as first-class: staying neutral made Grafana the layer every monitoring stack already had.
Aftermath
As of 2019-10-25 Grafana Labs was live and scaling: the $24M Series A had just been announced, new sales and COO executives were joining, and the roadmap pointed at better alerting for Grafana 7.0, a trace viewer and continued work across Grafana, Loki, Cortex and Metrictank. This material records no later outcome, so the company's subsequent funding rounds and later trajectory are not included here.
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