Data management startup Cribl nabs $319M at $3.5B valuation – SiliconANGLE

Cribl Inc., a startup with a suite of data management tools for enterprises, has closed an oversubscribed late-stage investment worth $319 million.

The Series E deal, which was announced this morning, included $200 million in equity funding and a $119 million secondary sale. Alphabet Inc.’s GV startup investment arm was the lead investor. CapitalG, another Alphabet-operated venture fund, participated as well along with GIC, IVP and CRV.

“Every company must modernize its data stack as legacy systems already can’t handle today’s rapid data growth, and the arrival of AI further accelerates the need for a modern data platform,” said GV General Partner Michael McBride.

Cribl’s flagship product is a cloud service called Cribl Stream that companies can use to move data between their applications. A retailer, for example, could load data about customers’ buying preferences into a demand prediction application. Cybersecurity teams can use Cribl Stream to move breach indicators from Linux servers into their malware detection engine.

In some cases, analytics tools are billed based on the amount of information that customers ingest. To reduce the cost of using such products, Cribl Stream can shrink a data stream while it’s zipping across the network. A company could, for example, remove duplicate items from an ad performance dataset to reduce the cost of loading it into a marketing analytics tool. 

Stream also allows users to modify their data streams in other ways. Before loading a record into a third-party cloud application, the service can remove sensitive details such as credit card numbers. A software team that uses Stream to gather data about application outages can enrich the information with error logs from an external troubleshooting tool. 

The software maker provides Stream alongside several complementary products. Two of those products, AppScope and Cribl Edge, ease the task of extracting data from a system for the purpose of moving it to an external location. The former tool focuses on collecting telemetry from applications, while the latter offering can also integrate with other data sources such as Windows devices. Information collected by the two products can be moved to external systems using Stream.

Companies that wish to retain the records they collect for an extended period of time may keep them in Cribl Lake, a data lake platform operated by the software maker. Workers can sift through the information stored in the platform using a built-in search tool called Cribl Search. There’s also an artificial intelligence chatbot that provides pointers on how to use the software maker’s products. 

Cribl says its technology powers data processing projects at about a quarter of the Fortune 500. The company’s annual recurring revenue topped $100 million last year. Its net dollar retention rate, a metric that tracks the extent to which existing customers increase their spending over time, reached 130% in the past 12 months.

The company’s recent growth milestones no doubt factored into the terms of its newly announced funding round. Cribl closed the Series E raise at a $3.5 billion valuation, a 40% increase over what it was worth in 2022. It will use the capital to grow its presence in international markets and build new features.

Image: Cribl