Chronosphere co-founders Martin Mao (CEO) and Rob Skillington (CTO). (Chronosphere Photo)

Chronosphere, a startup founded by former Uber and Microsoft engineers, has raised $11 million to build a platform that lets companies make sense of the data in the cloud. The Series A funding was led by Greylock with participation from Lux Capital.

Chronosphere CEO Martin Mao and CTO Rob Skillington first met at Microsoft, where they worked on migrating Office to the cloud-based Office 365 format.

Since then, the cloud landscape has “changed dramatically,” Mao said. Among the major shifts: companies are adopting technologies such as Kubernetes, moving from huge applications to microservices and shifting from physical servers to containers. The result is way more information than most companies are prepared to analyze.

Mao and Skillington experienced some of those challenges firsthand a few years later when they worked at Uber. The data they were grappling with grew tenfold each year, and they realized more scalable and cost-effective solutions were needed.

Uber couldn’t find any products to meet its growing data demands, so Mao and Skillington helped the company build one. The result was M3, Uber’s open-source production metrics system, which is capable of storing and querying billions of data points per second.

With Chronosphere, Mao and Skillington are building an end-to-end solution on top of M3 that helps companies both gather and analyze their data in the cloud with the help of visualization and analytics tools. The product works across multiple cloud platforms, including AWS and Azure.

“Chronosphere enables enterprises to run their business at a resolution that isn’t available from existing open source and commercial offerings. It’s like using a 4K monitor to run your business: once you use HD you can’t go back to VGA,” Jerry Chen, a partner at Greylock, said in a statement.

For now, Chronosphere is primarily targeting high-growth startups but sees a growing opportunity to sell to established large companies. “These are still early days in the cloud-native world for a lot of larger enterprises,” said Skillington.

And there’s still plenty of money to be made in the shift to cloud from enterprise companies and even governments. The Pentagon recently awarded its $10 billion JEDI cloud contract to Microsoft in a move that “surprised” rival Amazon.

Chronosphere is currently in private beta and hopes to launch a public beta in the first quarter of 2020. The 17-employee company splits its offices between New York, Seattle, Warsaw, and Lithuania.

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