Bay Area software firm LogDNA announced it raised $7 million in Series A financing from Initialized Capital, a New York-based venture firm headed by several former Y Combinator partners.
LogDNA is a cloud-based management system that aggregates system and application logs in a single platform. The system offers a design-centric UX/UI, a metered billing pricing model, and a proprietary algorithm that indexes data to increase search speed. Its platform has seen fast developer adoption; according to the funding announcement, the company’s user base has grown ten-fold in the last 12 months, reaching 1,500 paying clients and more than 10,000 users.
Credit: logdna.com
The new funding will be used to double down on machine learning to prevent server outages, ongoing development to deploy software in any private cloud or on-premise environment, and expansion of the company’s sales, marketing and engineering teams.
In an exclusive interview, NewsCenter.io spoke to LogDNA Cofounder and CEO Chris Nguyen, who is on his fourth startup. Three of Nguyen’s companies were cofounded by him and his current partner, Lee Liu; their previous companies were dating site Cupid.com, which they sold to EasyDate, and TeamSave, a social commerce platform that helped eBay Classifieds enter the daily deals market in Canada and the U.K.
Nguyen explained LogDNA’s value proposition as “helping engineers debug production issues better. One of our slogans is to ‘pinpoint production issues’,” he said. “If something is down right now, let’s help you fix that.”
LogDNA is focusing on a wide array of clients and plans to be industry and technology-neutral. “It’s everyone under the sun, really,” Nguyen explained. “We have ecommerce, healthcare, SaaS, mobile apps. As long as you’re running servers and producing audit trails, servers always go down and we help you fix that. There’s no niche focus…. As long as they’re able to port out that log trail to us, it doesn’t matter. We’re pretty agnostic in terms of anyone’s environment.”
The company’s main competitors, according to Nguyen, are Splunk, Sumo Logic and Log Entries. Splunk, the best known, is a $9-billion company, and Sumo Logic, has raised $230 million. However, Nguyen thinks his company has several competitive advantages: “There are three main reasons people use our service: The first is that our search is blazing fast; the second is that our UI/UX is intuitive; and the third is that people gravitate to us due to our flexible pricing.”
Nguyen also believes that, going forward, LogDNA will have another edge. “The reason we raised funding is that we want to help customers proactively identify issues before they become issues. We’ll do this by using AI,” he said. “We’re sitting on so much data, we know this is the time to expand our AI development efforts, which are in beta now, to help clients in a predictive way. We expect to turn that on for our wider client base sometime in Q1 or Q2, 2018.”