A Multi-Cloud Future: Our Investment in LogDNA

We're excited to announce we've led LogDNA's $25M Series B, helping developers spend less time sorting through logs and more time building products that change the way the world works.

Multi-cloud architectures are the future. Rather than hand a blank check to a single cloud solution like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud, companies are increasingly picking and combining the best individual products from each provider. Developers, companies, and users win when companies compete for their business.

As applications scale on these various clouds, they generate an ever-growing stream of log files. Log files record every interaction between an application and its users, other applications, and the infrastructure that supports it. Developers regularly review these logs to understand how their applications and infrastructure are performing, often searching for root causes to bugs and errors.

Unfortunately, current log management solutions aren't developer-friendly. Archaic incumbent Splunk is prohibitively expensive and struggles to parse, analyze, and search through ever-increasing datasets. Newer general purpose search applications like Elastic require developers set up and maintain their own systems. Neither of these are sustainable.

LogDNA gives power back to developers. Their multi-cloud architecture supports on-premise, public could, private cloud, and any combination of deployment options. Users can quickly search log files using natural language – no archaic query language required – jump quickly to a specific log, and build custom reports and dashboards.

Splunk can cost up to $1,800 per GB – logDNA costs $36.

LogDNA was born out of a pivot. Like the founders of Twitter, YouTube, and Discord before them, Chris and Lee began focusing on a tool to help ecommerce companies optimize sales using big data. Their log-reporting product was originally built internally to diagnose their own problems.

They’ve since scaled to helping thousands of engineers track petabytes of data, including the teams at Instacart, Lifesize, and scooter-rocketship Lime. LogDNA is even natively available in IBM’s Cloud, helping tens of thousands of engineers save time and dig deep into their applications.

“One of the companies we work with is Branch Metrics – they have dozens of machines running one of their apps. Their engineers used to physically log into machines and manually look at the log files. With LogDNA, they’re able to aggregate that data into one place. That’s been a game-changer for them.”

The company's cofounders, Chris Nguyen and Lee Liu, are uniquely suited to tackle this opportunity. This is their third startup together. Their first – JobLoft, a jobs board provider – was acquired in 2007. Both left to start TeamSave, a white-labeled solution for eBay Classified portfolio companies, scaling the team from two to fifty, 500,000+ transactions, and over a billion emails. They truly understand how to build and scale businesses, both financially and technically.

As we've gotten to know the team, we've been consistently impressed by their dedication to culture. Whether it's highlighting team members at all-hands meetings for big wins or deeply embedding their values into their interview process, Chris and Lee are building for the future.