American software company
Honeycomb (stylized as honeycomb.io ) is an American software company known for its eponymous
observability and
application performance management (APM) platform and for its
diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices. Honeycomb's
venture capital investors to date include
Headline ,
Scale Venture Partners , and
Insight Partners .
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
Honeycomb's tooling enables software developers to
debug live
software applications , especially those using a
microservice architecture.
[5]
[1] Honeycomb accepts telemetry from applications
instrumented with the
OpenTelemetry
SDKs .
[6]
[7] Structured
JSON data also can be accepted, as well as data from Honeycomb's custom integrations.
[8] Honeycomb offers metrics and tracing visualizations as well as AI-assisted debugging capabilities.
[9]
[3]
[10]
[11]
[12] The underlying software is a proprietary
columnar database running on
Amazon Web Services . Amazon has promoted the company as an early adopter of the
Graviton family of
ARM processors .
[13]
[14]
Honeycomb appeared on the
Thoughtworks Radar in 2019 and 2020.
[15] Analyst firm
Gartner named Honeycomb as a leader in its 2022 and 2023 APM and observability
Magic Quadrant reports.
[16]
[17]
Honeycomb's competitors include
Datadog ,
Splunk ,
New Relic , and
Dynatrace .
[16]
[17]
History
Charity Majors in 2019
Honeycomb was founded in 2016 in
San Francisco
[5] by Charity Majors and Christine Yen, both of whom were engineers at
Parse (later acquired by Facebook).
[1]
[18] After the acquisition of Parse by Facebook, Yen proposed to Majors that they found a
startup together. Majors wanted to build a tool that fixes problems with live applications running in the
cloud , inspired by the Scuba in-memory analytics tool they had used at Facebook.
[19]
Investors invested $4 million in
seed money ,
[18] followed by $11M in Series A funding in 2019
[1] and $20M in Series B funding in 2020.
[2] In 2021, Honeycomb announced a $50M Series C
funding round .
[3]
[20] In 2023, Honeycomb announced that it had raised an additional $50 million in Series D funding, for a total of $150 million in funding to-date.
[4]
[21]
In December 2021, Honeycomb began an experiment in
co-determination by appointing an
employee representative to its board of directors, an uncommon governance practice for a United States company.
[22]
[23] As of 2023, the executive team, board, and employees of Honeycomb are each at least half women and
non-binary , making the company unusually
gender diverse for a technology startup.
[21]
[24]
References
^
a
b
c
d Lunden, Ingrid (26 September 2019).
"Honeycomb.io raises $11.4M to help developers observe and debug their apps" . TechCrunch . Retrieved 11 October 2023 .
^
a
b Chan, Rosalie (2 February 2021).
"Developer startup Honeycomb, founded by ex-Facebookers, raises $20 million as growth surges" . Business Insider . Retrieved 10 October 2023 .
^
a
b
c Sawers, Paul (20 October 2021).
"Software observability platform Honeycomb raises $50M" . VentureBeat . Retrieved 10 October 2023 .
^
a
b Gillin, Paul (6 April 2023).
"Observability platform Honeycomb pockets $50M in new funding" . SiliconANGLE . Retrieved 10 October 2023 .
^
a
b Lohr, Steve; Griffith, Erin (2019-11-22).
"With Big Tech in Their Path, Start-Ups Turn to Business Markets" . The New York Times .
ISSN
0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-05-19 .
^
"OpenTelemetry becomes a CNCF incubating project" . Cloud Native Computing Foundation . 26 August 2021. Retrieved 11 October 2023 .
^ Gain, B. Cameron (23 December 2022).
"Observability in 2022: It Pays to Learn" . The New Stack . Retrieved 10 October 2023 .
^ Krill, Paul (2016-11-03).
"Ex-Facebook, Dropbox engineers offer debugging as a service" . InfoWorld . Retrieved 2023-05-19 .
^ Pariseau, Beth (3 May 2023).
"Observability maven 'cranky' about AIOps embraces GPT" . TechTarget IT Operations . Retrieved 10 October 2023 .
^ Vizard, Mike (3 May 2023).
"Honeycomb Taps ChatGPT to Simplify Observability" . DevOps.com . Retrieved 11 October 2023 .
^ Jackson, Joab (18 May 2023).
"With ChatGPT, Honeycomb Users Simply Say What They're Looking for" . The New Stack . Retrieved 11 October 2023 .
^ Vizard, Michael (10 June 2021).
"Honeycomb adds metrics to observability platform for service request tracking" . VentureBeat . Retrieved 11 October 2023 .
^ Jackson, Joab (15 July 2022).
"This Week in Programming: Honeycomb's ARM Advantage" . The New Stack . Retrieved 11 October 2023 .
^ Tiernan, Ray (12 July 2022).
"Amazon AWS announces Cloud WAN, 'one console to manage everything' " . ZDNET . Retrieved 13 October 2023 .
^
Technology Radar - Honeycomb (Technical report). Thoughtworks. 1 October 2020. Retrieved 10 October 2023 .
^
a
b Byrne, Padraig; Siegfried, Gregg; Bangera, Mrudula (2022-06-07).
Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability (Technical report). Gartner. Retrieved 2023-05-22 .
^
a
b Siegfried, Gregg; Bangera, Mrudula; Crossley, Matt; Byrne, Padraig (2023-07-05).
Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability (Technical report). Gartner. Retrieved 2023-10-10 .
^
a
b Bort, Julie.
"How this startup CEO became a secret weapon for star Valley engineers" . Business Insider . Retrieved 2023-05-19 .
^ Darrow, Barb (11 April 2017).
"Startup Honeycomb Vows to Show How Software Runs After Release" . Fortune . Retrieved 11 October 2023 .
^ Xing, Jessica (20 October 2021).
"Investors didn't really 'get' this DevOps startup at first — now it raised a $50 million Series C. Read the pitch deck that made it click" . Business Insider . Retrieved 10 October 2023 .
^
a
b Kamps, Haje Jan (20 April 2023).
"Sample Series D pitch deck: Honeycomb's $50M deck" . TechCrunch . Retrieved 11 October 2023 .
^ Kramer, Anna (16 December 2021).
"Honeycomb puts engineer on board of directors" . Protocol . Retrieved 22 May 2023 .
^ Bahat, Roy E.; Kochan, Thomas A.; Rubenstein, Liba Wenig (1 July 2023).
"The Labor-Savvy Leader" . Harvard Business Review . Retrieved 11 October 2023 .
^ Miller, Ron (6 April 2023).
"Honeycomb scores $50M investment as observability platform thrives" . TechCrunch . Retrieved 11 October 2023 .
External links