Apica, the company behind the data observability and data management platform Ascent, has acquired telemetry data management pioneer Circonus. It intends to integrate the Circonus functionality into the Ascent platform, with the assistance of the six employees who are joining it through the acquisition.
Apica also announced a new funding round of $6 million. This was led by Riverside Acceleration Capital (RAC), with additional funding from existing investors Industrifonden, SEB Foundation, Oxx, and Leo Capital.
Mathias Thomsen, Chief Executive Officer of Apica, commented, “This acquisition further solidifies our position as a trailblazer in data management and observability, and we are excited to welcome Circonus aboard. Its solutions are well aligned with our roadmap, and we will be able to provide our customers with a unified view of their entire technology stack. In addition, I’m happy that Riverside Acceleration Capital has invested in our active observability vision and looking forward to partnering with them as they join our influential group of investors.”
What will Circonus bring to Apica?
Besides, the six staff it will also bring two key applications to further strengthen the Ascent platform.
IRONdb
IRONdb was launched in 2017. It is a distributed time-series database focusing on simplistic operation, resiliency, and continues operations in the event of component failure. It has embedded analytics and computation. IRONdb addresses some of the key challenges faced by data management teams.
Features include:
- Replication – Don’t lose data during routine maintenance or outages.
- Multi-DC Capabilities – Don’t lose data if Amazon has an outage in US-east-1.
- Performance – It’s fast to write and equally fast to read.
- Data Robustness and Compression – Keep more data and don’t worry about corruption.
- Administration tools – View system health and show op latencies.
- Graphite-web interoperability – Plug it right into your existing tooling.
Passport
Passport allows data teams to gain control over pre-existing telemetry agents from a centralise agent manager. It claims that it’s the first-ever fleet management of all data collectors. Giving centralized visibility into the inventory agents, and centralized management of telemetry elasticity at the edge. Collection agents supported include DataPrepper, telegraf, logstash, fluenttxt and OpenTelemetry.
Bringing this into the Ascent platform will enable customers to better realise an understanding and potential of all their data. This will help those organisations gain better insights and inform decision making with them.
Ranjan Parthasarathy, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Apica, commented, “With the rate at which data continues to multiply, customers are increasingly in need of affordable solutions that eliminate data silos, reduce tool sprawl, and provide a holistic picture of the inner workings of their operational data. We are excited to deliver edge data control. As an active observability platform, we can quickly respond to many enterprise organizations’ data observability challenges and assist them in better using their existing investments.”
Enterprise Times asked Apica what the message is for the Circonus customers.
Thomsen answered, “Apica recognizes the value of Circonus’ IRONdb, and we are committed to investing in its development to accelerate innovation, enhance security, improve performance, and ensure resiliency. With Circonus integrated into the Apica Ascent platform, customers will gain access to a broader set of capabilities in data management and observability. We look forward to sharing specific examples and adjacent use cases to showcase how Circonus and Apica combined will empower customers to achieve greater value from the Ascent platform.
Another acquisition and funding
This acquisition follows the announcement in August 2023 of a $10 million funding round led by existing investors Industrifonden, SEB Foundation, and Oxx. In that announcement, Apica also revealed that it was buying data fabric and telemetry pipeline company LOGIQ.AI.
The new investor will likely have a seat on the board. Jim Toth, Managing Partner, RAC, commented, “We are impressed by Apica’s laser focus on offering enterprise customers a modern approach to managing and integrating diverse data sources so they can gain insights from their data through observability and data fabric.
“Organizations and teams responsible for observability are struggling with pricey renewals and surprise costs. Apica observability and data management eliminates these struggles and helps you resolve incidents faster and manage and access data across many sources and locations, like on-premises data centers, multiple clouds, and edge devices.
While the funding for Apica was only $6 million, Circonus has already raised $16.8 million, including $10 million in a series B round led by Baird Capital in 2021. What was the return on that investment for Baird and other investors? Was this the investor recovering some of the investment? Apica appears to have got a steal, though the amount it paid was not disclosed. It will be interesting to see what Baird say about this investment when they update their entry.
Enterprise Times Times: What does this mean
Apica has an interesting approach. It seems to get funding as it makes each acquisition on its growth journey. The company continues to extend its platform with both innovative organic and inorganic additions. It continues to deliver a modern approach to observability data management for enterprise organizations. Customers already include JPMorgan Chase & Co, Equifax, and Morgan Stanley. It will now add Circonus customers to that list, which include HBO, RedFin, Xandr and SmugMug.
One thing missing from the announcement is how quickly the Circonus solutions will be embedded within the Asent platform. Expect a further announcement around that in the near future. Is this the end of the acquisition trail for Apica, or will it look for new opportunities? Is RAC willing to invest further if the right one is found?
