New Relic secures $15M for cloud performance management

DAG Ventures and Fours join current investors to back cloud software in $3B industry

The cloud-based performance tool software, New Relic, has received $15 million in a Series D round of funding. The funding, announced on Wednesday, was led by new investors DAG Ventures and Four Rivers Group -- existing investors Allen & Company, Benchmark Capital Tenaya Capital and Trinity Ventures also participated.

The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2008, has received at least $33 million in funding to date.

A spokesperson with the company told me that this capital will go toward further investments in the development and expansion of New Relic’s cloud application performance management product.  The company is continuing to scale to meet demand from enterprise organizations for a SaaS-based solution to manage their cloud application environments and the new capital will greatly assist those efforts.

“New Relic has a clear vision for the future of this market and is uniquely positioned to reshape what it means to manage Web applications," Chris Cook, New Relic's president and COO said in a statement. "Businesses need to be able to monitor applications as quickly as they build them, regardless the language or platform they use, whether in the cloud or on-premise. We look forward to innovating even more new technology features within the product and expanding our business to meet increasing demand from enterprise organizations.”

New Relic has more than 13,000 active customers and manages sixbillion transactions in production each day in what the company estimates is currently a $3 billion market.

As more businesses look to bring their management systems into the cloud to help increase mobility, transparency, and scalability, the demand for support software has spiked.

"We believe over 80 percent of all Web applications will ultimately be managed by SaaS offerings like ours. We have a strong first-mover advantage, and an unprecedented opportunity to redefine Web application management, by making it affordable and consumable by everyone,” said New Relic's Founder and CEO Lew Cirne.

While New Relic exists in an industry with competitors such as AppDynamics, CA Wily and Compuware-Gomez, the company has made efforts to differentiate itself by providing in-depth application performance management (APM) for the next generation of Web and cloud-based applications. This can include backend server monitoring capabilities to real user metrics and supports five of the most commonly used programming languages (Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, and .NET.)

The company has seen substantial growth, touting more than 200% year-over-year revenue growth, due to the increased adoption of Web applications in the cloud.

Recently they have gained accounts with Comcast, Nike, and Zynga.