Sumo Logic, a cloud data analytics and log analysis company, announced a $110 million Series G investment today. The company indicated that its valuation was “north of a billion dollars,” but wouldn’t give an exact figure.
Today’s round was led by Battery Ventures with participation from new investors Tiger Global Management and Franklin Templeton. Other unnamed existing investors also participated according to the company. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $340 million.
When we spoke to Sumo Logic CEO Ramin Sayer at the time of its $75 million Series F in 2017, he indicated the company was on its way to becoming a public company. While that hasn’t happened yet, he says it is still the goal for the company, and investors wanted in on that before it happened.
“We don’t need to capital. We had plenty of capital already, but when you bring on crossover investors and others in this this stage of a company, they have minimum check sizes and they have a lot of appetite to help you as you get ready to address a lot of the challenges and opportunities as you become a public company,” he said.
He says the company will be investing the money in continuing to develop the platform, whether that’s through acquisitions, which of course the money would help with, or through the company’s own engineering efforts.
The IPO idea remains a goal, but Sayer was not willing or able to commit to when that might happen. The company clearly has plenty of runway now to last for quite some time.
“We could go out now if we wanted to, but we made a decision that that’s not what we’re going to do, and we’re going to continue to double down and invest, and therefore bring some more capital in to give us more optionality for strategic tuck-ins and product IP expansion, international expansion — and then look to the public markets [after] we do that,” he said.
Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at investor, Battery Ventures says his firm likes Sumo Logic’s approach and sees a big opportunity ahead with this investment. “We have been tracking the Sumo Logic team for some time, and admire the company’s early understanding of the massive cloud-native opportunity and the rise of new, modern application architectures,” he said in a statement.
The company crossed the $100 million revenue mark last year and has 2000 customers including Airbnb, Anheuser-Busch and Samsung. It competes with companies like Splunk, Scaylr and Loggly.
