Log Management Startup Humio Scores $20M From Dell, Accel

Dell Technologies Capital is the latest investor to back the company that aims to enable enterprises ‘to look at everything’ by driving down log ingestion, storage and analysis costs

With log analysis a heating sector of the infrastructure management landscape, Humio, which offers a unique platform for rapidly ingesting and analyzing log data, said Wednesday it secured $20 million in new funding.

Dell Technologies Capital led the startup’s B Round, joined by existing investor Accel, bringing Humio’s total funding to $32 million.

The San Francisco-based company is looking to enable its customers “to look at everything,” Morten Gram, Humio’s executive vice president of sales, marketing and channel, told CRN. To advance that goal, Humio just released an Unlimited Ingest for the Cloud plan that caps rates after customers surpass a certain threshold of usage.

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“The big thing, if you want to log everything, and do this in real-time, and at scale, and make that feasible for organizations, it has some unique requirements to the platform,” Gram said.

Expanding the collection and analysis of both machine and business data has traditionally been an expensive affair—often challenging CIOs and business leaders to justify the costs.

The startup, founded in 2016, looks to drive down those costs with a platform that increases efficiency across four crucial parameters: compute power, storage, operations and licensing.

The Humio platform, either installed on-premises or offered as Software-as-a-Service, achieves gains in efficiency that reduce the need for servers, storage capacity, and operational complexity, Gram said.

And the recently unveiled unlimited pricing plan takes that last step in delivering a solution that “makes it feasible to log everything,” Gram said. “They stop thinking about what they log.”

Part of the reason Humio can deliver cost-effective, all-encompassing log management, Gram said, is an underlying architecture that doesn’t index logs, but allows them to be consumed as unstructured data. That rapidly speeds ingestion and compression.

Then a layer of intelligent filtering “makes brute force search really fast” during the analysis phase, he added.

Log analysis is increasingly being applied to a broad spectrum of use cases, and Humio’s technology is currently used by DevOps and security teams, IoT systems, as well as for business analytics. While log analysis isn’t exactly a business analytics tool, it can be “one of best tools in market if you want information about your business in real-time,” he said.

The investment from Dell Technologies Capital is a “huge validation” of the technology the startup has built, Gram said.

That follows a unique partnership the company forged with IBM’s hybrid cloud division that supplanted the Elasticsearch ELK stack for many of Big Blue’s customers, he said.

Backing from Dell’s investment arm should open new opportunities for Humio, which is only in an early dialogue of exploring the potential benefits of a partnership with Dell Technologies, Gram told CRN.

When first launched, Humio started going to market with a direct sales model. But the startup hired a channel director in the U.S. last year and has seen its partner ecosystem grow rapidly since.

“The channel is something we have a huge focus on getting to work,” Gram told CRN, adding the company has a “no-conflict” channel strategy where sales agents work closely with partners.