Vendor lineage
Grafana Labs
A dashboard side project of 2013 that became the open observability platform: $270 million at a $6 billion valuation in 2024.
Grafana Labs' own history begins in December 2013, when Torkel Ödegaard, looking for a better way to make data more accessible and interactive, created an open source dashboarding tool he called Grafana; it was released in January 2014, an outgrowth of his work on Graphite at Orbitz, with a user interface originally based on version 3 of Kibana. The company around it was founded in 2014 as Raintank and later took the product's name, which combines Graphite and Kibana; its co-founders are Raj Dutt, the chief executive, Ödegaard and Anthony Woods.
Grafana does not store the metrics, logs or traces it shows. It queries other systems - Prometheus, Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB for metrics, Loki and Elasticsearch for logs, Tempo, Jaeger and Zipkin for traces, the SQL databases - and combines the results in one panel, keeping only dashboards, users and alert state in a database of its own. That design is why it became the front end to everyone else's telemetry, and why the company could build Loki, Tempo, Mimir, Pyroscope, k6, Faro, Beyla and Alloy around it.
The money followed the adoption: $24 million in 2019, $50 million in 2020, $220 million in 2021 at a $3 billion valuation, and on 21 August 2024 a $270 million round led by Lightspeed at a valuation above $6 billion, by which point the company had passed $250 million in annual recurring revenue, 5,000 paying customers up from 2,000 in 2022, and 20 million users worldwide; its own site today says it is trusted by more than 10,000 customers. Acquisitions built the stack: Kausal in 2018, k6, Pace and Amixr in 2021, Pyroscope and Asserts.ai in 2023, TailCtrl in 2024 and LogLine in 2026.
In 2021 the licence moved from Apache 2.0 to the AGPLv3, the same move Zabbix made in 2024 and a cousin of the fight recorded on the Elastic entry. Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise are the commercial forms. Of the monitoring companies on this record, this is the one that never sold a collector; it sold the screen.
Acquisitions
2018 Kausal
Listed among Grafana Labs' acquisitions; the page read does not describe the product.
Wikipedia: Grafana (read 2026-10-06).
2021 k6
Load testing.
Wikipedia: Grafana (read 2026-10-06).
2021 Pace
Developer tooling.
Wikipedia: Grafana (read 2026-10-06).
2021 Amixr
Incident response.
Wikipedia: Grafana (read 2026-10-06).
2023 Pyroscope
Continuous profiling.
Wikipedia: Grafana (read 2026-10-06).
2023 Asserts.ai
AI-assisted observability.
Wikipedia: Grafana (read 2026-10-06).
2024 TailCtrl
Trace sampling.
Wikipedia: Grafana (read 2026-10-06).
2026 LogLine
Log querying.
Wikipedia: Grafana (read 2026-10-06).
- Grafana Labs - About: 'In December 2013, looking for a better way to make data more accessible and interactive, Torkel Ödegaard created an open source dashboarding tool he called Grafana'; co-founders Raj Dutt (CEO), Torkel Ödegaard and Anthony Woods; trusted by over 10,000 customers; Loki, Mimir, Tempo, k6, Pyroscope, Faro, Beyla and Alloy (read 2026-10-06)
- Wikipedia: Grafana - released January 2014 by Torkel Ödegaard, an outgrowth of Graphite work at Orbitz, with a UI based on Kibana 3; Grafana Labs founded in 2014 as Raintank; the name combines Graphite and Kibana; $24M 2019, $50M 2020, $220M 2021 at $3B, $270M 2024 at $6B; AGPLv3 since 2021; acquisitions Kausal 2018, k6, Pace and Amixr 2021, Pyroscope and Asserts.ai 2023, TailCtrl 2024, LogLine 2026; the data sources and the LGTM stack (read 2026-10-06)
- TechCrunch, 21 August 2024: Grafana Labs raises $270 million led by Lightspeed at a valuation above $6 billion, up from $3 billion in 2021; past $250 million in ARR; more than 5,000 paying customers up from 2,000 in 2022; 20 million users; almost ten years since the company was established (read 2026-10-06)