Recovering from catastrophic system failures can be a daunting challenge when you lack crucial information. Surprisingly, many companies acknowledge that they are, in a way, operating in the dark when it comes to their software and critical infrastructure.
According to a recent survey conducted by Logz.io, a platform provider for observability, 64% of businesses struggle with an average downtime of over an hour primarily due to obstacles in obtaining the necessary data to pinpoint the root causes of issues.
Despite the numerous observability vendors claiming to have the ultimate solutions, Krishna Yadappanavar, a co-founder of Springpath (acquired by Cisco for $320 million in 2017), along with his Springpath colleague Ashish Hanwadikar and former VMware engineer Pankaj Thakkar, saw an opportunity for one more player in the field. They co-founded Kloudfuse, a company that offers a range of tools for data observability across diverse computing environments. (Yes, it’s “Kloudfuse” with a “K” instead of a “C.”) Kloudfuse has now come out of stealth mode with $23 million in funding, including a $17 million Series A round led by Newlands, with participation from Blumberg Capital, Aspenwood Ventures, High Sage, and Exponent.
Krishna Yadappanavar explained in an email interview with TechCrunch, “Hanwadikar, Thakkar, and I saw an opportunity to help developers, DevOps, and site reliability engineers who invest significant time in managing observability, troubleshooting data, and analytics, lacking automation capabilities. We co-founded Kloudfuse with the mission of making unified cloud observability more accessible and scalable to enterprises, enabling them to handle increased cardinality, gain more control, and reduce costs.”
Through Kloudfuse’s platform, technically a data lake serving as a centralized repository for unstructured observability data, customers can analyze metrics, events, logs, and traces from various software applications and machines. Kloudfuse also automatically alerts users to data anomalies that may indicate potential issues.
Krishna Yadappanavar added, “Economic factors such as high interest rates and fears of a looming recession are forcing organizations to cut observability bills. Thus, enterprises are being forced to balance keeping costs low without sacrificing safety, efficiency, and performance… Kloudfuse is well-prepared to weather potential economic headwinds, as the company is helping to solve a significant problem that touches all enterprises regardless of their size, sector, and structure.”
As mentioned earlier, Kloudfuse faces stiff competition in the observability space from companies like Acceldata, Sifflet, Observe, and Manta. However, Yadappanavar points out that Kloudfuse’s revenue has tripled in the last two quarters, with notable brands like Workday, GE HealthCare, and Automation Anywhere joining their customer base.
David Blumberg, managing partner at Blumberg Capital, expressed his support via email, saying, “We continue to invest in Kloudfuse because enterprises need a better way to maximize data observability while controlling budgets, without sacrificing security, efficiency, and performance. Krishna and team have earned the trust of large, sophisticated enterprises across industries and delivered value quickly.”
Kloudfuse plans to use the funds from their latest funding round to expand their product management, marketing, and sales teams.