Honeycomb Raises $50M Series D to Help Engineers Excel

The observability company will expand its tech and geographic footprint with the new capital.
Written by Ashley Bowden
April 6, 2023Updated: April 6, 2023
Honeycomb’s CEO Christine Yen poses for a photo outside.
Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb. | Photo: Honeycomb

In today’s digital landscape, nearly the entire software world is moving online, according to Christine Yen, CEO of observability company Honeycomb, meaning engineers have less time to test their apps ahead of deployment. Honeycomb works to help these developers determine whether their code is functioning as it should. The company announced on Tuesday it raised a $50 million Series D round led by Headline to enhance its own solution.

Honeycomb provides software engineers with telemetry data to help them figure out why their system behaves differently than they expected, Yen said. When a developer is writing software and running it in different places, they’re unable to tell what’s actually going on inside that system. Honeycomb captures the data that comes from running the software solution and presents it back to the developer in the form of graphs and charts that depict information about the end-user experience.

The solution helps developers understand whether their code is behaving as they intend for it to behave, as well as see what conditions cause their code to misbehave.

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Honeycomb’s observability tech also enables developers to change their queries and graphs to understand exactly where a problem is. The company said it aims to be less prescriptive in how it allows users to inquire about their code compared to its industry competitors. 

“Honeycomb is … acknowledging that today’s software engineering teams need a new class of tool to reflect all the changes that have occurred in how we write software relative to even five or 10 years ago,” Yen told Built In. “We want to build a tool that never has any dead ends when you’re using data to explore what’s going on with your with your code.”

The company’s latest round will go toward enhancing its observability solution with the intention of making it as accessible, friendly and intuitive as possible, Yen said. Its latest raise will also help fuel Honeycomb’s geographic expansion as well as help the company develop a strategy for potential integrations of other software development solutions. This software development ecosystem currently includes 100 partners such as CircleCI, LaunchDarkly and AWS.

One such tool that’s currently part of Honeycomb’s ecosystem is OpenTelemetry, an open-source observability platform that enables users to instrument, generate, collect and export telemetry data, according to OpenTelemetry’s site. Honeycomb will also invest in continuing its support for OpenTelemetry as it works to standardize what automatic instrumentation, or monitoring and maintaining the performance of complex digital apps, looks like today.

“I really want our customers to be able to do incredible things,” Yen said. “I want them to be able to build better software [and] spend less time on toil and more time making their products awesome.”

Jobs at Honeycomb.io

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