Era Software raises $15.25M for enterprise data management

Era Software, which was formerly known as EraDB, announced on Tuesday that it raised $15.25 million in a Series A round of funding.

EraDB officially rebranded as Era Software as part of the Series A announcement. The new round of funding was led by Playground Global and brings total funding to Era Software up to $22 million. When Era Software began in 2019 as EraDB, the company built a time series database, which has developed into service known as EraSearch.

EraSearch, which provides log management capabilities for enterprise data, became generally available as an on-premises service on Feb. 10 and is now moving into the cloud. Alongside the Series A on Tuesday, Era Software announced the beta availability of its EraSearch Cloud platform, with general availability set for later this year. EraSearch provides an ElasticSearch-compatible log search technology that lets organizations load, manage and query log data that could be coming from different system or applications.

In this Q&A, Era Software co-founder and CEO Todd Persen provides insight into how his company is growing and why the future of data management is likely to be hybrid.

Why are you now raising a Series A?

Todd Persen

Todd Persen: At this point, the EraSearch product is ready for pretty big workloads and is handling them for larger customers. We raised a decent-sized seed round of $7 million at the end of 2019 that let us get from two employees 20 employees right before this fundraiser. That money was for us to turn our aspirational tech designs into a product.

We still had some runway in the bank and could have pushed pretty far through this year without needing more capital. But we felt like we're starting to see real traction, and we wanted to grow faster at a bigger scale.

The plan with the money is to continue scaling engineering, but really start to build out that sales team, and start to bring in some of those other functions that will allow us to be a little bit more efficient as an organization.

I think we ended up at the high end of the money range for where we wanted to raise. The incumbents in the space are big, whether it's Elastic, Splunk or Sumo Logic, all three of them are publicly traded companies now, and they've got deep technical and capital resources. We need to execute really well, and I think the cash gives us the ability to do that.

We felt like we're starting to see real traction, and we wanted to grow faster at a bigger scale.

Where do you see organization choosing to run EraSearch data log management? Cloud or on premises?

Persen: For certain use cases or certain organizations, they want to go on premises as they either have a security need or a security concern. Those types of organization want to be able to keep logs in-house under their control, and not have them shared on a third-party cloud service. I think that'll probably be the way it stays for some companies for a while, depending on the nature of their business.

With projects that are scaling where log volumes are increasing, being able to just have a cloud service that can handle high-volume log data as a service, and not worry about it, is something that's becoming a lot more appealing to companies that are growing.

We expect to see a lot of the consumption to move to the cloud, but some will still want the flexibility of being able to do on-premises. I do see a hybrid world where maybe some teams for development, testing and staging push to a cloud environment, because it's really easy to manage and scale. I also would expect that some production teams or the higher-security teams push to an on-premises version. I think that's what's happening in a lot of organizations where there's segmentation. The upside is that by giving them both versions, they can have a consistent experience and a consistent interface across all those tools.

How is EraSearch Cloud built, and what makes it different than on-premises log data management?

Persen: Part of our of entire design thesis all along has been, if we build something that can run really well on premises, for any given customer, we should be able to run it ourselves as a cloud service, with relative ease. Obviously, you know in reality that never plays out quite the way you hope.

A lot of what we've been doing is essentially putting the pieces around the things we deploy on customer sites to make sure that we've got what we need to run in the cloud. Things like provisioning, handling authentication and building out those layers to make it a really functional cloud experience.

I would say Kubernetes gives us maybe 80% of what we need to enable a cloud service. The other 20% is about making it cloud-friendly for users. The service is in preview now and I would say probably end of Q2 is of our target for opening up for more of GA [general availability] type release.