Third Point Ventures and Investor Groups Support Market Growth Plan
SAN FRANCISCO — August 4, 2016 — Kentik Technologies, the network traffic intelligence company, today announced that it has raised $23 million in a Series B funding round led by Third Point Ventures, with participation by existing investors August Capital, Data Collective (DCVC), First Round Capital, and Engineering Capital, and new investors Glynn Capital and David Ulevitch.
The new investment will enable Kentik to meet strong demand for its big data-based network traffic and performance visibility solutions. Kentik plans to use the additional capital to increase headcount in the next year to accelerate product capabilities and expand market reach.
“We are thrilled to bring Kentik into our portfolio of cloud technology companies. The exceptional team, high-value technology and resulting aggressive customer adoption of Kentik’s offering made this a compelling investment for us,” said Robert Schwartz, Third Point Ventures Managing Partner. “There is a big gap in network visibility for digital business operations, and Kentik’s disruptive big data analytics fills that gap in a way that is far more powerful and easier to use than legacy options. We look forward to helping Kentik with their market and product expansion as the world continues to shift to digital business models that are critically dependent on network traffic delivery.”
Kentik ingests network data at Internet scale – hundreds of billions of records per day – in real-time, and allows users to run multi-dimensional queries and receive visualizations in a few seconds. This allows Kentik to support key network visibility use cases at greater scale and detail than previously possible.
“As one of the first vendors we’ve seen to bring a native SaaS and big data approach to network visibility, Kentik is already capitalizing on a sizeable market showing a healthy annual growth rate,” said Jim Duffy, senior networking analyst at 451 Research. “The growth of Kentik’s customer base and progress in product capabilities since it launched service in mid-2015, combined with the infusion of new capital, bodes well for its ability to capitalize on new customer expectations around network monitoring.”
Since launching its groundbreaking SaaS-based network traffic analysis platform a year ago, Kentik has earned industry recognition as a 2016 Gartner Cool Vendor for Availability and Performance. Kentik has gained over 60 customers, including some of the world’s largest web enterprises such as Box, Yelp, Pandora, Shopify, Dailymotion, Neustar, OpenDNS and Instart Logic.
Kentik attained entry to new markets as one of five global startups chosen by the innovation arms of service provider giants Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Singtel and Telefonica through their Go Ignite alliance.
“We founded this company because we believe in the value of data to make businesses run smarter, faster, and with more innovation. We’ve been extremely gratified to see customers respond so positively to our vision and solution for network analytics,” said Avi Freedman, Kentik CEO. “This latest round of funding validates the traction we’ve achieved with our approach to the market, and will help us continue to revolutionize what network traffic intelligence means for numerous use cases across network operations, engineering, and security.”
“We’ve supported Kentik from the beginning, and have seen how strongly they’ve executed on their goals, including on-boarding an amazing, who’s who customer list,” said Howard Morgan, partner at First Round Capital. “Avi and his team have consistently delivered on their promises, and we’re excited to participate in this round to accelerate Kentik’s growth.”
“Kentik has fundamentally altered the value you can get from network data. Old methods were so slow and costly that they couldn’t solve real-world problems like figuring out what’s really behind application performance issues,” said Matt Ocko, co-Managing Partner of DCVC. “Kentik’s depth and speed of insight means that network teams can find and fix issues that APM solutions don’t see; security teams can be a step ahead of DDoS attacks instead of always behind the curve; planning teams can improve user experience while reducing costs; and marketing teams can offer customers more insight into their critical traffic than they’ve ever had before. This adds up to a massively compelling ROI for Kentik’s customers. Together with Kentik delivering this industry-beating ROI via a defensible big data platform that can ingest and index trillions of packets a day, fully SQL-query-responsive in real-time, made us enthusiastic to far exceed our pro-rata share in this investment round.”
Kentik is aggressively hiring in sales, systems engineering, marketing, software development and operations. For more information, visit https://www.kentik.com/careers.
About Kentik:
Kentik provides Kentik Detect, a cloud-based network visibility and analytics solution that delivers unprecedented depth of insight into any network. Kentik processes tens of billions of data records per day, equipping service providers and enterprises network operations teams with actionable insights that enable them to make quick, cost-effective decisions. The company was founded by network and Big Data technologists and executives from companies like Akamai, CloudFlare, YouTube, and Netflix, with decades of experience in operations, architecture and distributed systems. Kentik is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Visit www.kentik.com or follow @KentikInc on Twitter.