It began as an open-source project around a decade ago, and now InfluxData is armed with a fresh round of funding that will help it work toward profitability.
The San Francisco-based data management startup announced a $51 million Series E on Wednesday that was led by Princeville Capital and Citi Ventures, and also included Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund and Sapphire Ventures. It brings the company's total funding to $171 million.
Along with the equity round, InfluxData also secured a $30 million debt facility from Silicon Valley Bank.
CEO Evan Kaplan told me the debt facility is a backstop that they'll tap into as needed, but he's using the new capital from the Series E round to fuel the company's growth as it eyes reaching profitability.
"We're not living in a growth-at-all-costs world anymore. We're looking at profitable growth," Kaplan told me.
InfluxData helps developers manage so-called time series data — essentially, any type of data that's tracked with a time stamp. It serves industries as varied as finance, telecommunications, retail, manufacturing and health care.
The company was co-founded in 2012 by current CTO Paul Dix and Todd Person. Kaplan has been the company's chief executive for about seven years and has been also made the internet of things, or IoT, a focus under his tenure.
"We were seeing sensors, and sensors get cheaper. They were everywhere. Our home, our health care, automotive, our cities. … Whatever the measure is, it's a measure in time," Kaplan said. "I had a very strong belief that the time series and IoT would go well together and that's been a part of what's driven the company's growth."
The company says its customers include Tesla, Nest, Hulu, PTC, Siemens, Cisco and IBM, in addition to its open-source community, which has 750,000 projects using its software.
Although the company's main product is the free open-source platform, InfluxData also offers an enterprise version, which generates about half of its revenue, and two other cloud-native products.
Other database management providers that offer time series data management include AWS, Microsoft Azure and open-source project Prometheus.
Software marketplace G2 ranks InfluxData as among the top companies in its industry.
Kaplan also intends to take the company public at some point, though likely not in the near term. Public debuts just about ground to a halt last year, and the Bay Area hasn't had a major tech IPO in over a year.
Kaplan nearly took another company public about two decades ago, but those plans were shattered during the dot-com crash in 2000. It was also a lot more difficult to raise capital at that time.
"In 2000 and 2001, you saw a lot of empty vessels," Kaplan said. "I was out raising money and I did raise a large round during that period of time but that was by far the toughest round I've ever raised in my whole life. It was super hard. The market was illiquid. It was really grim."
Today's market is tough but doesn't compare to the bust of that era.
"This reset is harsh but nowhere near that level," Kaplan said. "This was really driven by the zero interest rates and not just by the tech hyperbole."
