Seeing through the cloud: Humio’s Series A round

The widespread rise of cloud native platforms and applications is one of the most powerful enterprise technology trends of the last decade. Now we are seeing the next phase of that development: the evolution of tools that help companies navigate the challenges, and unlock the opportunities, of cloud native environments, with one of the key areas being observability.

Observability is a pressing need for companies that build modern applications, often in distributed microservices driven architectures. Enterprises need the ability to scrutinize data and generate critical insights, in real time, to understand, optimize, and troubleshoot everything from app performance to network security. But with the rise in the volume and velocity of data, existing mechanisms for categorizing and interrogating it are showing the strain. Many solutions are not keeping up with the complexity and resource demands of these new environments, and organizations are faced with terabytes of data they’re not able to process on a daily basis. Simply put, if you don’t capture it, or you can’t process it, then you can’t observe it.

That is why we are excited to be announcing our Series A investment in Humio, a cloud native log management platform that is enabling real time observability, for both cloud native and on-premises applications. Humio offers a new approach to a well-established problem: how to store, and mine insights from, log data. It is designed to handle the scale inherent in cloud environments, ingesting data at sub-second latency. Their built from the ground-up approach allows customers to store orders of magnitude more data than competitors, while keeping cost and the infrastructure footprint under control, regardless of where the application is deployed.

Importantly, Humio is built with a developer-first mindset, with no restrictions on the exploration and querying of log data. This provides crucial support for teams who are pushing code daily. It democratizes observability, making the necessary knowledge more readily available to more users, supporting the kind of flexible, and fast-moving workflows needed for modern modular software development.

We’ve been impressed to hear from Humio’s customers about the product’s ease-of-use, its intuitive query language, and the interactivity it brings to exploring logs. Many of these customers are large enterprises or sophisticated tech companies on both sides of the Atlantic.

We are incredibly excited to be partnering with Christian, Geeta, and Kresten, the co-founders of Humio, in this journey. All three are experienced technologists who’ve been immersed in the cloud native world for many years and who’ve experienced the problem Humio is addressing first-hand. They exemplify the type of founders we love to work with: relentlessly ambitious, deeply aware of the problem they’re solving, and keen to build a dedicated and talented team to achieve their mission. Founded out of Aarhus, Denmark, and with offices in San Francisco and London, Humio is yet another example of how high-potential companies are emerging from all across Europe and serving a global customer base.

Our Series A partnership with Humio builds on a long series of investments from Accel in companies addressing developers’ needs. We have backed companies from Atlassian, Split and Xebia Labs, focused on developer workflows and productivity, to Instana, Sentry and Sysdig, which are monitoring distributed architectures and production environments, as well as Heptio and Weaveworks, which are driving enterprise-wide Kubernetes adoption.

We believe Humio, and its highly experienced team, will become an important part of this modern IT ecosystem. And we’re thrilled to be on board as an early investor, helping the team achieve their bold ambitions and enabling their global expansion.