“The days are long but the years are short.” Sage advice for a parent managing life with young kids. I recently showed my daughter a time lapse photo, and she was captivated. It got me thinking, what is it about time lapse photos that makes them so mesmerizing? Well, they tell a story and take us on a journey through time — in an instant! There’s magic in organizing our memories this way.
Turns out there’s magic in organizing all sorts of data in this way. One way for companies to take advantage of this is called the time series database, and I’m thrilled to announce today that Norwest Venture Partners is leading a $60M investment round in InfluxData, the company behind InfluxDB and the leader in the time series database market.
Time series data are measurements or events that are time stamped and tracked over time. What kind of data? Data from servers, sensors, stock tickers, smart thermostats, or even connected cars. All this data can be best understood and interpreted as a journey through time. Time series databases have actually existed for many years. But everything is being instrumented nowadays resulting in an explosion of data and a modern time series database is needed that is purpose-built for cloud and real-time analytics. Time series is now the fastest growing category of the database market and InfluxDB is the clear leader in this space. See the trendline in popularity according to DB-Engines.com:
InfluxData leverages an open source business model which has become a proven path to building multi-billion dollar modern enterprise companies. Case in point are MongoDB ($5.4B market cap as of today) and Elastic ($6.3B market cap): two companies that successfully scaled revenue all the way through IPO, driven by a developer-centric model. InfluxDB shares the same characteristics and patterns, all starting with fanatic developer love as evidenced by its 15,000+ Github stars!
I’m excited to partner with Evan Kaplan, Paul Dix, and the entire team at InfluxData to help them fuel their growth and domination of the time series space. And I’m delighted to take this journey through time (pun intended!) with my co-investors Battery, Mayfield, Sapphire, Sorenson Capital, and Trinity.
