UPDATED 08:00 EST / FEBRUARY 20 2019

INFRA

GV, Salesforce back $50M round into network intelligence startup ThousandEyes

Last year, a pair of damaged fiber optic cables caused a nationwide internet disruption that left millions of Americans temporarily unable to access parts of the web. Such large-scale outages are rare, but more localized connectivity hiccups occur quite frequently and represent a serious issue for corporate information technology departments.

San Francisco-based ThousandEyes Inc. is working to arm enterprises with intelligence into network problems that may disrupt their operations. The startup today announced that it has secured a $50 million Series D round led by GV, Alphabet Inc.’s venture capital arm. Salesforce.com Inc., Sequoia Capital and a few other institutional investors participated as well.

ThousandEyes operates a cloud-based platform that helps companies track how their network traffic travels around the world. The startup relies on specialized software sensors, or agents, to gather information about the underlying infrastructure.

The company has set up its software in cloud data centers throughout 54 countries to monitor the world’s carrier networks. The startup also lets enterprises deploy agents in their own internal infrastructure, as well as the devices through on which employees access internal applications. ThousandEyes’ platform stitches together the data from these different sources to create a map of the network paths through which a company’s traffic flows.

This map enables IT teams to pinpoint the exact spot where data is being held up when there’s a connectivity issue. If Tokyo-based employees are having trouble accessing an application hosted in their company’s U.S. data center, administrators can use ThousandEyes to look at each stop the workers’ browser requests make on their way there. That includes all the different carrier networks the requests pass before reaching the application.

ThousandEyes provides insight into the performance, latency and error rate at each leg of the network path to help with troubleshooting. When viewing traffic that flows through their companies’ own networks, administrators can also access metrics about the specific devices that process the data.

Troubleshooting connectivity issues is just one of several uses for this data. ThousandEyes claims its platform can also help companies identify potential weak points in their networks, as well as make more informed decisions when planning future infrastructure investments.

The startup counts 20 of the world’s 25 largest software-as-as-a-service providers and six of the top seven banks in the U.S. as customers. ThousandEyes will use the new funding to grow its presence by expanding internationally markets and speeding up product development.

The company has raised more than $110 million to date.

Co-f0under and Chief Executive Mohit Lad spoke about the company last year with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s video studio:

Photo: Unsplash

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