LogDNA, a startup that helps DevOps teams dig through their log data to find issues, announced a $25 million Series C investment today along with the promotion of industry vet Tucker Callaway to CEO.
Let’s start with the funding. Emergence Capital led the round with participation from previous investors Initialized Capital and Providence Equity. New investors TI Platform Management, Radianx Capital, Top Tier Capital and Trend Forward Capital also joined the round. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $60 million, according to the company.
Current CEO and co-founder Chris Nguyen says the company provides a centralized way to manage log data for DevOps teams with an eye towards troubleshooting issues and getting applications out faster.
New CEO Callaway, whose background includes executive stints at Chef and Sauce Labs, came on board in January as president and CRO with an eye toward moving him into the top spot when the time was right. Nguyen, who will move to the role of Chief Strategy Officer, says everyone was on board with the move, and he was ready to step back into a more technical role.
“When we closed the latest round of funding and looked at what the journey forward looks like, there was just a lot of trust and confidence from my co-founder, the board of directors, all of the investors on the team that Tucker is the right leader,” Nguyen said.
As Callaway takes over in the midst of the pandemic, the company is in reasonably good shape with 3000 customers using the product and a strategic partnership with IBM to provide logging services for IBM Cloud. Having $25 million in additional capital certainly helps, but he sees a company that’s still growing and intends to keep hiring..
As he brings more people on board to lead the company of approximately 100 employees, he says that diversity and inclusion is something he is passionate about and takes very seriously. For starters, he plans to put the entire company through unconscious bias training. They have also hired someone to review their hiring practices to date and they are bringing in a consultant to help them design more diverse and inclusive hiring practices and hold them accountable to that
The company was a member of the same Y Combinator winter 2015 cohort as GitLab. It actually started out building a marketing technology product, only to realize they had built a powerful logging tool on the back end. That logging tool became the basis for LogDNA .