Time series specialist InfluxData raises $81 million to focus on real-time analytics

Time series database provider Inflow data announced today that it has raised $81 million in a combination of debt and equity financing. The company said it plans to use the capital to further develop its recently launched InfluxDB IOx database engine.

The new engine represents a major rewrite of InfluxData’s underlying technology and focuses on the important area of ​​operational analytics. It’s an area where systems are connected to highly instrumented data-intensive populations of devices that must now run at cloud scale and process inputs in real time.

The company turned to the increasingly popular Rust programming language when it created InfluxDB IOx, InfluxData CEO Evan Kaplan told VentureBeat.

“InfluxDB IOX is developed with Rust, which is designed for speed, efficiency, and reliability, giving users a new powerful time-series engine to ingest, store, and analyze large amounts of high-speed data in real time, as well as generate statistics. “to lead on the fly of high granularity events,” Kaplan said.

The engine, as Kaplan explained, powers InfluxDB, reimagining the database as a columnar real-time analytics platform that can ingest billions of data points in real time and provide query results in a matter of milliseconds.

It supports the full range of time series data and expands the number and variety of use cases InfluxDB can handle, including observability and distributed tracing, which rely on high cardinality data.

Funding to accelerate engine roll-out

With the new funding, including $51 million in Series E led by Princeville Capital and Citi Ventures and $30 million in debt financing, InfluxData plans to further develop the new engine and accelerate its ongoing rollout and expansion efforts.

Evans said InfluxDB plans to introduce new capabilities in bulk data ingestion, bulk data export, and seamless integration with business intelligence tools such as Tableau and PowerBI, among other improvements. Also planned is a launch of dedicated cloud tiers and a new enterprise on-premises product based on InfluxDB IOx.

At a time when some major tech companies are scaling back their workforce, Evans said InfluxDB plans to scale up its R&D, sales and marketing teams, which will grow its workforce by about 10% by the end of 2023.

The effort to double down on the real-time engine comes as the number of devices and sensors within an enterprise continues to explode. These devices generate timestamped data every subsecond, and enterprises need to analyze and contextualize it at a very granular level. InfluxDB IOx attempts to fill this gap, even in scientific, engineering, and IoT use cases.

Increasing competition for time series data

Founded in 2012 by Paul Dix, now CTO, InfluxData has evolved into a leading time-series data specialist, providing enterprises with a purpose-built platform, called InfluxDB, to analyze time-stamped information and produce business-critical trends or forecasts. The platform claims a customer base of nearly 2,000.

Although the market is often described as a ‘niche’, the list of time series database makers has grown tremendously since InfluxData was founded. It contains Imply, Time scale, Druid, Amazon Time Stream, Microsoft Azure data explorerQuestDB and Prometheus.

Notably, data cloud leader Snowflake has recently made time series predictions by announcing its intent to acquire Myst.

For his part, Kaplan, head of InfluxDB, says the company sets itself apart from other players by supporting large-scale ingestion of all types of time-series data and providing sub-second answers to queries.

“InfluxData is also one of the few vendors to offer edge and open source versions of the product, as well as special instances,” said Kaplan. Nevertheless, he added, he welcomes the fact that numerous emerging open source vendors are entering the space. Such interest from suppliers indicates growth potential.