Two months after releasing its artificial intelligence-based microservices management service, Instana Inc.  has secured a $20 million funding round led by Accel (formerly Accel Partners).

The Series B round brings total funding to $27 million for the company, which was founded in Solingen, Germany and has its U.S. headquarters in San Francisco. The funds will be used for sales and product development, the company said.

Instana is applying machine learning to the increasingly complex task of managing applications based on containers and microservices. The constantly changing nature of microservices-based applications, combined with the transient nature of containers, makes the discipline of forecasting performance and managing resources far more complex than it was in the days of static, vertically integrated applications. The application performance management market grew nearly 14 percent last year and is expected to reach $5.6 billion by 2020, according to Gartner Inc.

The company’s technology uses machine learning to discover services on a network down to the code level. It builds a time-sequence model that shows the containers and services that make up an application and the patterns by which they change. Services discovery takes less than one minute and continues as new components and dependencies are created.

The company said it has signed up nearly 100 enterprise customers in 10 months, including financial services, healthcare, retail, communications and cloud-based service providers such as Edmunds.com Inc., Sixt SE, iOffice Inc., Audi AG and Clear Score Technology Ltd. It recently added intelligent analysis of Amazon Web Services Inc. products and powered health management for the Kubernetes container orchestration platform.

Image: Instana