Member Article

Honeycomb Expansion in Europe Fueled by New Series C Investment Led by Insight Partners

Former Pivotal, SignalFx, and Chef Software executive, Andy Hawkins, joins as Regional Director to lead Honeycomb’s European presence and growth 

Honeycomb, the leading observability platform used by high-performance engineering teams to quickly visualise, analyse, and improve cloud application quality and performance, announced today its expansion into Europe, led by the appointment of former Pivotal, SignalFx, and Chef Software executive Andy Hawkins, as well as the close of a $50 million Series C round. This latest round was led by New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Headline (formerly e.ventures), Storm Ventures, Industry Ventures, and NextWorld Capital. Honeycomb has raised $96.9M of funding to date.

This latest round of capital will allow Honeycomb to launch several initiatives that will help accelerate its growth in Europe, including:

• Increasing awareness of quickly evolving observability practices in the European market and fueling further growth of Honeycomb’s extensive European customer base.
• Hiring and building a new European team to ensure Honeycomb continues to provide world-class support to both existing and new customers across the globe.
• Investing in engineering community events to further drive awareness, training, and customer enablement toward integrating observability into their modern DevOps, SRE, and software development practices as they continue to proactively transform their digital businesses.

Andy Hawkins will join Honeycomb as Regional Director, bringing more than 20 years of leadership in helping organisations adopt DevOps practices and deliver optimal customer experiences. Andy has proven success in leading high-growth teams and will lead Honeycomb’s expansion in the region to grow and scale local support for European customers. Prior to joining Honeycomb, Andy was the Field CTO of application security observability provider TrueFort, Inc. and Vice President of Technical Operations at SignalFx. Andy also previously served as the Field CTO of Pivotal and the European lead for Chef Software Inc.

Honeycomb’s rapid growth is fueled by teams transitioning from APM to observability to better meet their business objectives. Observability is succeeding APM because it enables teams to quickly find critical issues in their cloud-native, microservices-based apps. Modern microservice architectures increase velocity and scale but also add painful complexity and unpredictability, which legacy APM tools fail to debug because they were built to examine simpler monolithic applications in predictable environments. Honeycomb is built to tame the complexity of modern applications. The recent round of funding comes as observability adoption rapidly accelerates and, according to O’Reilly Media,

“Observability saw the greatest growth in the past year (128%), while monitoring is only up 9%. Successful businesses around the globe are embracing our powerful observability tools to quickly identify and fix issues in ways that lead to optimal application performance, especially in increasingly complex systems,” said Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb.

“With the infusion of capital together with the launch of our official presence in Europe, and the addition of Andy Hawkins to our team, we can meet the growing demand for our solutions and better serve our expanding customer base in Europe.”

In the past year, Honeycomb has grown exponentially, tripling the number of fast-growing enterprise customers with presence in Europe like HelloFresh and Booking Holdings. Using machine analysis, a lightning-fast query engine, and integrated distributed tracing, Honeycomb empowers their customers to slice and compare billions of rows of data about their systems across thousands of high-cardinality dimensions to quickly find application performance patterns down to individual users and services. Unlike APM tools, observability provides a high level of data fidelity and exploratory tooling that makes the unpredictable quickly understandable, leading to better uptime, higher-quality and faster user experiences, more engineering time spent on innovation, and better business outcomes—the markers of high-performance engineering teams.

“Honeycomb is already bringing significant value to our customers with a presence in Europe, and with this further investment, I believe we are well positioned to handle the rapid expansion of organisations’ observability needs,” said Andy Hawkins, Regional Director, Europe, Honeycomb. “I have worked in this space for many years and believe Honeycomb’s approach is truly unique in the industry. With engineering teams facing increased pressure to meet the rising customer expectations in the transformation to digital, this has created an urgency in Europe that can be met with Honeycomb’s solutions to manage application performance. I’m excited to join the team at Honeycomb as the company embarks on its next stage of growth.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Sharmee Mavadia .