Former Facebook Engineers Score Another $50M for Observability Platform

Honeycomb, a software observability platform used by developers at companies such as Stripe and Slack has raised $50 million in a Series D funding round, bringing its total capital raised to $150 million.

The investment was led by venture capital firm Headline with participation from existing investors Insight Partners and Scale Ventures. The company’s most recent investment was another $50 million in a Series C in 2021 led by Insight.

Adding to the momentum, Honeycomb also chalked up recent key customer wins with Robinhood, Frasers Group and Equinix, who all join a list of customers like Vanguard and Vercel. In addition, Kelly Watkins, former VP of global marketing at Slack and CEO of Abstract, has joined the board of directors.

Honeycomb, which takes credit for popularizing the term “observability” offers a platform for engineering teams to quickly understand what their code does in the hands of real users in unpredictable and complex cloud environments.

The startup said it doubled revenue and employee headcount in 2022 and achieved 160% net revenue retention, a measure of earned revenue from existing customers, across more than 600 customers.

“High-performance engineering teams need accessible, intuitive observability workflows. While our competition is busy rearchitecting their data stores, we’re once again leading the pack by delivering innovative, developer-centric features that scale the power of knowledge across teams,” said Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb.

The seven-year-old San Francisco-based firm was co-founded by Yen and CTO Charity Majors, former Facebook engineers, in 2016.