Led by founders who met at Microsoft, Chronosphere lands $200M, reaches unicorn status

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Chronosphere co-founders Martin Mao (left, CEO) and Rob Skillington (CTO). (Chronosphere Photo)

Chronosphere has reached unicorn status in less than three years.

The company this week announced a $200 million Series C round, propelling its valuation past $1 billion. It comes nine months after the startup raised a $43 million Series B round.

Founded in 2019 by former Uber and Microsoft engineers, Chronosphere offers “data observability” software that helps companies using cloud-native architecture monitor their data. Customers include DoorDash, Genius Sports, and Cudo. Its annual recurring revenue has grown by 9X in 2021.

Chronosphere CEO Martin Mao and CTO Rob Skillington first met in the Seattle area at Microsoft, where they worked on migrating Office to the cloud-based Office 365 format.

They both later spent time at Uber on engineering teams. Uber couldn’t find any products to meet its growing data demands, so Mao and Skillington helped the company build one. The result was M3, Uber’s open-source production metrics system, which is capable of storing and querying billions of data points per second.

With Chronosphere, Mao and Skillington are building an end-to-end solution on top of M3 that helps companies both gather and analyze their data in the cloud with the help of visualization and analytics tools. The product works across multiple cloud platforms, including AWS and Azure.

Chronosphere recently decided to be remote-first. Its largest hub is in New York City, and there are a handful of employees in Seattle, including Mao. The company has 80 total employees and expects to add another 35 people this year.

General Atlantic led the Series C round. Other backers include Greylock Partners; Lux Capital; Addition; Founders Fund; Spark Capital; and Glynn Capital. Total funding to date is $255 million.

“Sitting at the intersection of the major trends transforming infrastructure software – the rise of open-source and the shift to containers – Chronosphere has quickly become a transformative player in observability,” Anton Levy, managing director at General Atlantic, said in a statement.

GeekWire