BigPanda, Inc. cemented its leadership position in the AIOps market with a new $190 million funding round. This financing round was led by Advent International, through its dedicated technology fund, and New York-based global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners, with participation by other existing investors. Eric Noeth, partner at Advent, will join BigPanda's board of directors, and Sanjay Poonen, formerly President of SAP and COO of VMware, will join as a strategic advisor.

BigPanda provides an AIOps Event Correlation and Automation platform that enables IT Operations teams to automate incident management and keep their digital businesses running smoothly. The hybrid cloud infrastructure powering the digital economy is rapidly growing in scale and complexity, causing an explosion of IT data that is overwhelming IT Ops teams. Organizations struggle with manual and reactive incident response processes that are badly suited for the scale, complexity and velocity of modern IT environments. This results in painful outages, unhappy customers, growing IT headcount and the inability to keep up with the demand for always-on digital services.

That's why the world's most advanced organizations are turning to BigPanda as the first step in their AIOps journey. BigPanda's AIOps platform transforms huge volumes of IT data into actionable insight and automation. With BigPanda, businesses automate incident management, prevent IT outages, increase the velocity of their digital business and deliver extraordinary customer experiences. 

"In the age of Covid, it's impossible to conduct commerce without a strong digital presence. This reality has fueled demand for solutions that make managing complex digital environments easier," said Eric Noeth, Partner at Advent International. "We could not be more excited to partner with BigPanda as the leader in the increasingly critical AIOps space. Not only is BigPanda the most powerful solution in the market, but they have generated tremendous value for some of the most storied brands across sectors and we are thrilled to be working with the company as it continues innovating in the category."

This funding will enable BigPanda to continue to innovate on its best-in-class AIOps capabilities, by increasing the size of its machine learning, product, and R&D teams, as well as making strategic acquisitions. The funding will also be used to scale BigPanda's go-to-market activities, by building out its sales, marketing, customer success and partnership teams.

"As the clear leader in AIOps event correlation and automation, BigPanda is now enjoying powerful network effects as they sit in between the ‘pandamonium' of the upstream IT data, on one side, and the downstream collaboration systems, on the other side," said Lonne Jaffe, Managing Director at Insight Partners. "BigPanda's extraordinary momentum is a testament to its product differentiation, customer success maturity and skilled leadership, and we couldn't be more excited to support the company's growth into the future."

IT Operations Rising
Once acknowledged only when outages occurred, IT Operations teams are now recognized for maintaining every organization's mission-critical digital presence. This shift dramatically accelerated with the onset of COVID-19, as digital services exploded overnight in terms of their scale and importance to consumers' everyday lives. 

In the race to improve online experiences, CIOs needed to quickly accelerate digital transformation initiatives. This put a spotlight on IT Operations, NOC, DevOps and SRE teams who are charged with maintaining the availability and performance of applications, systems and networks that are the backbone of digital services. These professionals are driving a movement to modernize IT Operations by leveraging AIOps - the combination of AI-powered event correlation and automation - to automate manual incident management, turbo-charge digital services and enable extraordinary customer experiences.

Illustrating the rising demand for AIOps, BigPanda's 2021 AIOps Benchmark Report found more than 90% of organizations are already investing in AIOps or plan to soon, and the 16% of respondents who qualify as early adopters say AIOps already makes a significant operational impact on their organization.

Tremendous Demand for BigPanda
As the pandemic challenged businesses to accelerate and scale delivery of their digital services, the market responded with incredible demand for BigPanda and its products. BigPanda's traction in the market is illustrated by a number of metrics, including:

• Sales in 2021 (net new ARR) grew by 155% on a year-over-year basis
• Gross dollar retention was 97% on a last-12-months basis, showcasing world-class retention and value realization among customers
• Net dollar retention was 122% on a last-12-months basis, driven by Fortune 2000 customers rapidly increasing their usage of BigPanda across their entire global footprint
• Q4 2021 set new records for the number of new customers added in a single quarter, and nearly doubling the customer base since 2019
• 2021 also set records for the number of existing customers who expanded their BigPanda footprint
• BigPanda had a 5x year-over-year increase in $1M+ deals
• BigPanda's customer success team onboarded more customers in 2021 than any previous year
• Total revenue flowing through the channel tripled, and the total number of deals generated by BigPanda's channel partners more than doubled in 2021
• BigPanda also grew by 104% in new employee hires in the last two years
• Over 1500 IT Ops professionals, including 250 BigPanda customer users, engaged in regional field events and the annual IT Ops community conference, RESOLVE

"The need among IT Operations teams for AI-powered insights and automation has exploded in recent years," said Assaf Resnick, co-founder and CEO of BigPanda. "The scale of the digital economy is rapidly growing. At the same time, enterprise adoption of cloud and cloud-native environments has reached a tipping point. This has placed a huge burden on IT Operations teams in terms of the growing scale and complexity of the IT data that must be consumed and responded to in order to keep digital businesses running. These teams are turning to BigPanda for help."