Networking monitoring company ThousandEyes – launched in 2010 with a $150,000 federal grant by two UCLA doctoral students – has raised $50 million in Series D funding from investors including GV, formerly Google Ventures; the venture capital arm of Alphabet, Inc.
The company – which in 2017 announced it would be basing its R&D hub in London – monitors internet traffic, letting users collect detailed forensic data of network topologies, dependencies and behavior for better networking intelligence. Its customers include eBay and HP.
Read this: FTSE 100 Vulnerability Warning: Over 70% Have Single DNS Provider
“ThousandEyes is seeing remarkable traction with Fortune 500 customers and this sustained growth is a testament to the scope of the network visibility problems they continue to solve,” said Dave Munichiello, General Partner at GV in a release announcing the funding today.
He added: “As enterprises increasingly rely on applications and services in the cloud, their CIOs and CTOs are losing visibility and control of the networks and outages impacting end-user digital experiences. ThousandEyes… has an objective view of enterprise services, clouds, and their performance that is unparalleled in the technology ecosystem.”
ThousandEyes spiel is that “the internet is part of your corporate network.”
As the company puts it in a whitepaper [pdf] on its offering: “Some (or all) branch offices likely connect to your data centers over a carrier-owned link. Employees access applications via remote VPNs, telecommute from home or log in on their mobile connections. Software as a service and infrastructure as a service-hosted applications further muddy the definition of where your network begins and ends.”
The company aims to help companies troubleshoot, monitor, alert and analyse this increasingly heterogeneous network from a single interface.
The Series D round brings ThousandEyes’ total funding to more than $110 million. Thomvest Ventures joined the round as a new investor alongside existing investors Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures and Tenaya Capital.
The new funds will be used to expand the company.
The raise comes after ThousandEyes boasted it now counts 20 of the 25 top SaaS companies, and four of the top five UK banks as customers. It has boosted headcount by 25 percent over the past year to 250 people and opened new offices in Ireland, Australia, Germany and The Netherlands.
“Over the last year, we have seen unprecedented growth as both domestic and international demand for digital experience intelligence continues to increase at an extraordinary pace,” said Mohit Lad, co-founder and CEO, ThousandEyes.
“This new funding round will allow us to further invest in both product innovation and global expansion as we quickly find our solution becoming a non-negotiable piece of the modern operations stack that’s necessitated by the rapidly growing $206 billion cloud market*.”
In 2018 ThousandEyes was first to provide details on one of the biggest global outages of the year, which occurred when Google traffic was mistakenly routed through Russian and Chinese ISPs, resulting in partial service disruption. ThousandEyes also detected a major Comcast fiber-cut outage that cut off or slowed down service for millions of Internet users, even beyond Comcast’s customer base.
