InfluxData, creator of the InfluxDB time series platform, has raised $81m in capital funding, closing a $51m series E funding round.

Time is a critical context for understanding data. Time series data preserves that context in a usable format to anticipate and determine trends over time. As the world becomes more instrumented, applications, sensors and systems emit a relentless stream of time series data that, when collected and analysed, deliver valuable real-time insights.

The time series market matured significantly in the past two years, as developers from start-ups to Fortune 500 enterprises migrated to purpose-built databases to analyse their time-based data across complex systems.

InfluxDB is a time series database with more than 1900 commercial customers including Tesla, Nest, Hulu, PTC, Siemens, Cisco and IBM, and a thriving open-source community with 750,000 active open instances of InfluxDB running globally every day.

InfluxData maintains strong customer and community adoption of InfluxDB Cloud, representing half of revenue and adding more than 6000 users each month.

“The tailwinds are behind time series and InfluxData, evidenced by the significant growth of our cloud business, which now represents nearly half of our revenue,” said Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData. “As the pioneer of the modern time series market, we played a pivotal role in driving the recent acceleration in this sector, pushing time series from the edge to the cloud and, now, into analytics. Our investors believe in our vision for time series to power the most sophisticated and large-scale analytics use cases our customers and community can imagine.”

James Governor, analyst at RedMonk, added: “The use of time series data for operational analytics is an increasingly important strategic concern and, as such, the market is one of the hottest in IT right now. In this age of cloud and edge, everything is instrumented, driving explosive growth in data volumes and the need for more scalable analytics platforms. That’s the market InfluxDB is addressing.”

The raised capital will help accelerate the development and ongoing rollout of the company’s new database engine built on the open-source project, InfluxDB IOx. The engine reimagines InfluxDB as a real-time columnar datastore built to ingest billions of data points in real time and with unbounded cardinality, supporting the full range of time series workloads in a single database. These capabilities raise the bar for time series analytics by supporting real-time use cases that rely on metrics, events, traces and other high-cardinality data. The investment allows InfluxData to bring these platform capabilities to its expanding global customer base, while continuing to develop open-source features.

The funding round was led by new investors Princeville Capital and Citi Ventures, with participation from existing investors Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Sapphire Ventures and others, and a $30m debt facility with Silicon Valley Bank. The Series E financing brings InfluxData’s total equity funding raised to $171m.

“InfluxData’s successful execution of cloud-native services is a testament to the size and maturity of the time series market,” said Vivian Huang, principal at Princeville Capital and a new InfluxData board member. “InfluxData has amassed a significant user base with more than 1900 customers, indicators of its market leadership and strong product execution. I’m excited to partner with a category-defining company and to work with InfluxData’s board to build on its impressive work in bringing time series mainstream.”

Vibhor Rastogi from Citi Ventures added: “Time series is a high-growth market that has become foundational for real-time data analytics in financial services and almost every major industry. InfluxData stands out as the time series leader, delivering real-time analytics at market-shaping scale with its new database engine. We are excited to bring InfluxData into our portfolio, and to support the company’s proven vision for time series analytics.”

And Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at Battery Ventures, said: “InfluxData’s significant and continued market traction is a testament to its focus on bridging the scale of time series data with the power of the cloud. InfluxData’s impressive execution on InfluxDB IOx redefines time series analysis in the cloud, paving the way for a new era of real-time analytics. I applaud InfluxData’s strong management team for navigating the early time series market exceedingly well to anticipate the significant growth of this market and commitment to deliver true impact.”