InfluxData Bags $16M To Organize IoT Data

By some estimates, a passenger riding in a “smart car” that is essentially doing the driving could produce nearly a gigabyte of driving data every second.

That is a lot of data to be tracked and analyzed — and the databases by Oracle and SQL just weren’t quite designed for this. But InfluxData is — this is, in fact, what they were designed to do, and they’ve just landed $16 million in Series B funding to get their solution for the taming the mounting data pile out and into the wild. The latest round of funding was led by Battery Ventures with participation from Mayfield, Trinity Ventures and Bloomberg Beta.

InfluxData’s specific area of expertise is something called time-series data. Traditional SQL databases can quickly become bloated and overwhelmed when tasked with doing continuous queries in real-time. And as the IoT is getting off the ground, it isn’t just cars that are going to be throwing up massive amounts of data — if everything from consumer appliances to industrial grade piping has an internet connected sensor in it constantly updating information, something has got to be able to get over the data and keep it in readable, usable form.

“We want those SaaS providers to use us underneath,” said Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData.

The value proposition of InfluxData’s core platform, InfluxDB, is that it’s designed for people to write on top of it; so far it is being used on 40,000 unique sites. And those sites are unique — Nordstrom, eBay, Solar City and Mozilla are all InfluxDB customers.

“What’s special about InfluxDB is that it’s easy to consume,” said Dharmesh Thakker, a partner at Battery Ventures who will be joining the InfluxData board. “It shouldn’t take days and months to set up or people lose interest.”

InfluxDB is an open source technology — which has meant that it hasn’t grown revenue, but it has built an active developer community fairly fast. The next phase of the business — that which the new venture funds are keyed to — will be marketing and further customer acquisition, as well as more proprietary products to run on top of InfluxDB.