Unravel Data, the only data operations platform providing full-stack visibility and AI-powered recommendations to drive more reliable performance in modern data applications, today announced it has raised $35 million in an oversubscribed Series C funding round. Point72 Ventures, founded by renowned hedge fund investor Steve Cohen, led the round with participation from Harmony Partners, and existing Unravel investors Menlo Ventures, GGV Capital and M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures).

"At first glance, application performance management (APM) may seem like a problem that has been addressed by the APM and log management vendors such as AppDynamics, New Relic, Splunk, and DataDog. The reality is that these solutions were not initially built for modern data systems. By being natively built with modern IT in mind, Unravel can cost-effectively deliver the data application awareness and AI-powered recommendations, resolutions, and answers that organizations demand," said Mike Leone, senior analyst at ESG. "Additionally, as workloads migrate to cloud platforms, the complexity of multiple systems, locality of services and technologies, different operating and pricing models, and constantly changing dependencies throughout the data pipeline add higher levels of risk to migrations, performance optimization challenges, and cost concerns."

"Most industry-leading companies are now software businesses, and a majority of those businesses are running on top of mission-critical big data applications," said David Dubick, Partner, Point72 Ventures. "These big data tailwinds have created a demand for tools to monitor, optimize and secure these systems, and Unravel is uniquely positioned to address this need in the marketplace."

"CIOs in our network told us story after story of traditional application monitoring tools failing in a big data context because those tools were designed for the world of the past. And we didn't just hear this problem from third parties, we were seeing it at Point72 as well," said Matthew Granade, Chief Market Intelligence Officer at Point72 and Managing Partner of Point72 Ventures. "This new architecture requires a different product, one built from the ground up to focus on the unique challenges posed by big data applications. Unravel is poised to capture this emerging big-data APM market."

Company Momentum Highlights

Today's funding news follows a year of significant momentum for Unravel as evidenced by a series of milestones:

• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) growth of 500%
• Cloud Services Product and Partner Momentum

• Microsoft Azure Cloud Partner Ecosystem -- Unravel introduced support for Azure services and uses operational data from Azure HDInsight, Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Hive, and HBase to automatically troubleshoot on-going issues that reduce confidence and performance on customers' clusters. Unravel also correlates this full-stack data to help in migration to Azure. Unravel is available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and is co-sell ready.
• AWS Cloud Partner Ecosystem -- Unravel introduced its platform across the Amazon ecosystem supporting Amazon AWS, Amazon EMR, Cloudera EDH for AWS, Hortonworks Data Cloud on AWS, and MapR CDP on AWS, providing critical operational intelligence. Unravel is an AWS Advanced Partner and is available in the AWS marketplace
• Industry Accolades - Gartner named Unravel Data to its list of "Cool Vendors" for 2018 in Performance Analysis; Analytics and Containers. CRN awarded Unravel as a ‘Top 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Company,' and Unravel made CNBC's Upstart 100 list.

"Every business is becoming a data business, and companies are relying on their data applications such as machine learning, IoT, and customer analytics, for better business outcomes using technologies such as Spark, Kafka, and NoSQL," said Kunal Agarwal, CEO, Unravel Data. "We are making sure that these technologies are easy to operate and are high performing so that businesses can depend on them. We partner with our customers through their data journey and help them successfully run data apps on various systems whether on-premises or in the cloud."

Market Validation

"Enterprises are turning to technologies like Spark, Kafka, MPP, and NoSQL to embrace a data-centric approach to their business. The challenge is that there are massive skills shortages associated with architecting, managing, and optimizing all these integrated tools supported by numerous vendors across a data pipeline. In fact, on average, organizations work with 37 different vendors across their data pipeline today. Many of the technologies they rely on have their own monitoring and management tools, and this exacerbates the problem, creating operational silos and ultimately preventing end-to-end insight," said Mike Leone, senior analyst at ESG. "How can organizations effectively utilize a wide range of applications like customer analytics, fraud prevention, and predictive maintenance that rely heavily on next-generation technology like AI and machine learning? By turning to a comprehensive data operations platform. Unravel allows customers to manage and optimize all their data pipelines from one location. By using AI-driven recommendations and automation, a high percentage of manual troubleshooting can simply be eliminated, enabling data operations teams to be proactive in preventing future issues."

"As enterprises of every size choose the Azure Cloud platform to build and deliver their modern data applications,  Unravel has proven an important tool to help operationalize this data and drive tangible value to the business" said Rashmi Gopinath, partner, M12 Ventures. "Azure and Unravel have worked closely on product development and go-to market execution and are well positioned to meet this market demand."

Investor Quotes

"There's a tremendous need to enable organizations to maximize the value of their data infrastructure investments," said Mark Lotke, founder and managing partner, Harmony Partners. "Unravel fills that gap perfectly as the only company that is truly using machine learning and an AI-driven platform to optimize and operationalize data-driven applications and the data systems they depend on at scale. The Unravel team demonstrated incredible growth in 2018 and is poised for an even bigger year in 2019 as demand for data operations solutions accelerates."

"It's clear that enterprises continue to struggle with dealing with the enormous amount of data that fuels their businesses. Legacy approaches have failed and they need to modernize their systems or risk being made irrelevant. Unravel is leading the pack in providing technology innovations that provide this competitive edge and fuel the next generation of cloud and hybrid cloud data services," commented Venky Ganesan, managing director, Menlo Ventures.

"Since we led the company's B round, we have been blown away by the market momentum that Unravel has achieved in a short space of time.There is clearly an unmet need in large enterprises for solving the complexity and operational challenges they face as they transition to being data driven and cloud first," said Glenn Solomon, Managing Partner, GGV Capital. "Current approaches are failing these data ops teams and Unravel has come to market with technology innovation and go-to-market execution that is solving real world problems, today."