What $24 Million Means for Our Open Source Community

This morning, we announced that Grafana Labs has raised $24 million in Series A funding. Here’s what that means for our open source community.

Our company was established five years ago to accelerate the adoption of the Grafana project and to build a sustainable business around it, which could in turn help support the community. Since then, we’ve expanded further in the open source world, creating Metrictank and Grafana Loki and contributing heavily to projects such as Graphite, Prometheus, and Cortex. Our business has always been guided by open source principles, with community at the forefront.

With this fund raise, we are committed to investing even more in the open source community. That goes hand-in-hand with pushing forward with our vision of building an open, composable observability platform that brings together the three pillars of observability – logs, metrics, and traces – in a single experience, with Grafana at the center. This will allow users to choose their favorite combinations of observability tooling and bring them all together in one UX – an industry first.

In short, we’re staying true to our roots while reimagining what’s possible.

We’ve brought on a few key team members to help us achieve these goals: Douglas Hanna, Chief Operating Officer; Dave Kranowitz, Vice President of Global Sales; and Ryan McKinley, Vice President of Applications.

You may recognize Ryan as the leading community contributor to Grafana. He’ll be responsible for helping the community build solutions with Grafana that go beyond the traditional IT use cases.

Today, our global community comprises millions of end users and thousands of developers. We’re proud to have already built Grafana Labs into a sustainable open source business. So while we didn’t need to fundraise, we are excited to be able to invest even more in what’s always been most important to us: the community and game-changing technology.