From left to right: Dritan Bitincka, Ledion Bitincka, Clint Sharp, Michael McBride
We live in a time of revolutionary technologies, from AI agents transforming our work to advanced analytics securing our data. However, these new products and companies produce an avalanche of data. A modern data engine is needed to ensure IT and security data is always moving to the right place at the right time, millions of times a second. Companies need Cribl.
Cribl empowers companies to deploy massively data-rich technologies by keeping costs low and performance exceptional in entirely new ways. In the process, they are creating a new data platform category for IT and security while setting the standard. It’s a big, ambitious vision that has already met exceptional success, with rapidly growing sales to nearly half of the Fortune 50 and a quarter of the Fortune 500.
I joined GV to support that kind of ambition. In Cribl, I’ve seen a strong team in a giant market with incredible technology that customers love. This rare combination made me confident to lead my first investment, one of the largest in GV’s 15-year history, into Cribl.
I’ve been fortunate to spend decades in operational roles building businesses alongside great teams that served similar large market opportunities with product vision and strong execution. I see similar potential in Cribl’s opportunity. GV takes pride in its collective ambition to achieve big things and in the right way. At my last company, GitLab, GV stood out among our investors for supporting us even when the right decisions meant bigger near-term investments in exchange for much larger long-term customer results and company success. I love this mindset, and I'm grateful to support founders in this way from the GV platform.
Most important are the ambitions of the companies in which GV seeks to invest. Great founders want investors, of course, but they also want shared vision, operational expertise, an appetite for taking on hard problems, and most of all, commitment to seeing their world-changing ideas all the way through.
When I first met Clint Sharp, CEO and co-founder of Cribl, he struck me as a leader with a world-changing lens. Even before I joined GV, I’d heard good things about the company from customers and leaders I trust. I studied them in earnest and spent time with the executive team. I understood why customers like Accenture, Vodafone, and SAP are so excited by Cribl. They’ve created what may be the essential data product of the next several decades, enabling companies to deliver and deploy breakthroughs that will affect billions of people.
What they’re doing comes down to data. Thanks to the cloud revolution, IoT, massive cybersecurity expansion, and stringent regulatory requirements, the world is generating more data than IT and security teams can manage, and it’s growing at a 28% CAGR (IDC), even as the data-heavy technologies of AI are only starting to kick in.
No incumbent IT and security data product handles this dramatic acceleration well. Before Cribl’s founders, no one I’ve met had figured out how to analyze, collect, store, process, and route data at this scale to every destination, according to a single governing policy, while staying compliant and connected to every tool in the enterprise. Many point solutions are over 15 years old, and were built for a world where a terabyte of data was a lot (and cost a lot!). Today, companies collect 1,000 times that, a petabyte of data, every week.
Incumbents, built in the old world of data creation and consumption, took all of the data to all of the tools, and charged their customers whether it was needed for that task (or not). Most of the time, they charge for data that’s irrelevant to the problem people are trying to solve. Today, that isn’t just expensive; it slows the entire company down and even blocks work. And, of course, it gets worse as data increases.
You can see how important it is that Cribl focused on solving the hard problem of getting only the right data to the right place. Value creation comes from data in motion— at high speed and minimal cost. Cribl does this at scale, offering overall data management from a single point, collecting data from any source at a rate of billions of events per second, optimizing storage, and gaining efficiency across the enterprise. It’s all about giving customers the choice, control, and flexibility they need to make the most of their IT and security data.
Security teams spot anomalies faster, tracing threats as they are happening. AI and infrastructure teams can realize their potential with Cribl’s unified approach. These achievements, however, aren’t the only reason we invested.
Like many successful founder CEOs, Clint’s calendar is crazy. Last May, we were trying to find a time to meet, and he only had an hour to talk on the phone while he was in Lisbon for a Cribl event. Instead, I offered to come to Lisbon so we could meet in person. While the team was surprised that I would be willing to travel 10,000 miles for a lunch meeting, they accepted and I got on the plane.
That’s where I really got to know Clint Sharp, Dritan Bitincka, and Ledion Bitincka, the company co-founders, along with the leadership team, and saw the areas where they wanted to grow. I was excited about the ways GV could uniquely help support them in scaling the business and working with the go-to-market teams to meet the most ambitious opportunities.
It wasn’t just the business, product, or metrics that stood out. It was the way the team made sure to use every single minute of my time on the ground to our collective advantage. This “meeting” became a fully managed, two-way engagement to ensure everyone was successful in the most effective way possible. They welcomed me, included me, and went out of their way to share time and insight beyond my expectations.
I remember thinking to myself that if this is the way they treat me on a visit like this, their customers and partners must love working with Cribl. I immediately reached out to customers and heard them describe Cribl as a “partner” and a “guide”. Not once did they say “vendor”. This is the X-factor that can make the difference in a generational company. Delivering a customer experience is a powerful lever that only strong leadership, teams, and culture can create.
Cribl is well funded and one of the fastest-growing infrastructure companies of all time — growing from $1M to over $100M in ARR in under four years and counting over forty percent of the Fortune 100 as customers. Cribl’s next step is to deliver on the long-term opportunity by investing in their sales teams and further expanding their products to ensure their customers can keep their feet on the gas and grow into the AI era.
I’m deeply proud to lead today’s $319 million (and oversubscribed) round. It’s an honor to partner with the founders and Cribl team and join the board. GV is committed to Cribl as a new company we believe the world only sees a few times a decade. While it happens to be an unusually large investment and my first at GV, I would not have it any other way as we keep pace with the ambition and opportunity at Cribl.