Cribl Raises $200 Million in Series C Funding to Advance Data Observability

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Founded in 2017, San Francisco-based startup Cribl named itself after an obscure device called a cribble – which the company defines as “an instrument with a meshed or perforated bottom generally used for gold panning in order to strain valuable material from discardable matter.” Cribl, indeed, aims to help companies pan for gold in their data, identifying and routing data to ensure that it reaches the correct destinations. Now, the company has raised $200 million in Series C funding to advance these ambitions.

For now, Cribl offers two products. First, its self-proclaimed flagship product, LogStream, which comes in cloud and local flavors and promises to “send data to the most effective destinations … for long-term retention.” Second, AppScope, which the company advertises as “a new approach to black-box instrumentation delivering ubiquitous, unified telemetry from any Linux executable by simply prepending scope to the command.”

Cribl makes the case for LogStream’s growth on three facets of today’s market: the rise of remote work, the rise in security breaches, and the ever-growing requirements for privacy compliance. LogStream, Cribl argues, can reduce the burden imposed by these factors by offering a single pipeline that is agnostic to analytics tools and storage destinations, allowing customers to integrate Cribl’s products with tools like Datadog, Exabeam, and Splunk.

“Enterprises today are caught between the mythical ideal of a single pane of glass for all data insights, and the harsh reality that they have to install agents everywhere they want to observe data,” said Clint Sharp, co-founder and CEO of Cribl. “Cribl, our customers, and investors recognize there’s a better way – to create a unified data pipeline, with the same agents across security and operations, that allows enterprises to maximize the value of their existing investments. This isn’t a ‘better’ or ‘faster’ version of what’s in the market – it’s an entirely new, open architecture for observability.”

The Series C funding round was led by Greylock and Redpoint Ventures, joined by returning investors CRV and Sequoia and new investor IVP. Cribl closed its Series B funding less than a year ago (in October 2020), raising $35 million. In total, the company has raised $254 million.

“Cribl is truly unique as they are the only vendor in the market giving [today’s IT and security] teams both the power and the choice to manage – and enrich – the onslaught of data in a totally agnostic way,” said Scott Raney, managing director at Redpoint Ventures. “We hear again and again that their customers are in awe when they use Cribl, which is not feedback we hear very often in this space. We’re very excited to partner with this exceptional team tackling this challenging and critical issue.”

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