SignalFx
| Company type | Private (acquired by Splunk) |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software, Cloud monitoring, Analytics |
| Founded | February 2013 |
| Founder | Karthik Rau, Phillip Liu |
| Fate | Acquired by Splunk |
| Headquarters | San Mateo , United States |
Area served | Global |
| Products | Monitoring and analytics platform for infrastructure, applications, microservices, containers, functions |
| Parent | Splunk |
SignalFx operates as a SaaS provider specializing in monitoring and analytics, with its main office located in San Mateo, California. The company offers solutions designed to analyze, visualize, automate, and generate alerts based on metrics derived from infrastructure, applications, microservices, containers, and functions. Its platform utilizes a streaming architecture that divides metric information into metadata and time-series data streams, which are transmitted via a publish-subscribe (pub-sub) system to SignalFlow—an analytics language accessible through the SignalFx GUI and programmable APIs. This infrastructure handles millions of data points every second at a one-second granularity, maintaining latency generally below two seconds between data ingestion and alert issuance.
History
SignalFx was established in February 2013 by Karthik Rau and Phillip Liu. The company raised $8.5 million in its Series A round from Andreessen Horowitz, with Ben Horowitz joining the board of directors. In 2015, it secured $20 million in Series B financing led by Charles River Ventures, with continued support from Andreessen Horowitz; Devdutt Yellurkar also joined the board at this stage. By May 2018, SignalFx announced a $45 million Series D funding round led by General Catalyst, alongside prior investors. The Series E round followed in June 2019, raising $75 million under the leadership of Tiger Global Management, bringing total capital raised to $179 million.
Among SignalFx’s clientele were companies such as Athenahealth, Chairish, Ellie Mae, Carbon Black, Kayak, Shutterfly, Sunrun, and Yelp.
On August 21, 2019, SignalFx was acquired by Splunk for $1.05 billion to strengthen Splunk’s cloud-native observability and application performance monitoring capabilities by incorporating SignalFx into its Observability Suite. The acquisition consisted of 60% cash ($630 million) and 40% Splunk common stock (SPLK), with the transaction completing on October 2, 2019.