Splunk provides the engine for machine data, allowing organizations to monitor, search, analyze and act on massive streams of real-time and historical machine data.
Background:
Splunk is one of the companies that helped define log management as a technology category. The company was founded in 2003 to help organizations manage the voluminous amount of data being thrown off by computer logs from a variety of applications, servers and network devices, without the need for expensive databases or data warehouses. Splunk’s products allowed customers to index, manage and get searchable access to log/IT data in real time, and then generate reports, dashboards and other outputs to act on it. In this way, machine data could be made more accessible to all parts of an organization and help improve operations. Today, Splunk’s platform is used to power security, IT and DevOps.
Battery has been a longtime investor in data-focused companies and was intrigued by Splunk as it reached a later stage of development and was running at or near profitability. The firm worked with an existing investor to acquire secondary shares in the business.
Outcome:
Splunk went public in 2012 (NASDAQ: SPLK).
The presented case study investment was made in particular economic and market conditions. There can be no assurance that Battery Venture would elect, or be able, to exploit similar opportunities in a similar manner under similar or different economic and market conditions. More generally, there can be no assurances that the Battery vehicles will have comparable investment opportunities in the future. No assumptions should be made that any investments identified above were profitable. It should not be assumed that recommendations made in the future will be profitable or comparable to the portfolio company described in this case study. For a full list of all Battery Ventures investments, please click here.
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