# Better Stack raises $18.6M for a ClickHouse-based Datadog challenger # Better Stack raises $18.6M for a ClickHouse-based Datadog challenger - Better Stack is building a radically better observability stack that brings Figma-like collaboration to developers, leveraging the advances of the ClickHouse database. - Serving over 70,000+ developers and 1,400+ customers, Better Stack is now an established alternative to the likes of Datadog, New Relic, and PagerDuty. - Better Stack raised $18.6M from Creandum, Susa Ventures, K5 Global, Credo Ventures, Kaya, Lachy Groom, Ryan Petersen (founder of Flexport), Michael Stoppelman, Emil Eifrem (founder of Neo4j), Zach Sims (founder of Codecademy), Madhu Muthukumar (CPO at Notion) among others. - The Series A round was led by Creandum with Carl Fritjofsson joining the board. ![](https://imagedelivery.net/xZXo0QFi-1_4Zimer-T0XQ/bc257977-61a4-42d9-1ffb-0ede256f6b00/public =1151x768) **San Francisco (US), 21 July 2022**: Better Stack raises a Series A round from leading European early-stage investor Creandum, a backer of Europe's best tech companies including Spotify, Klarna, and SEON. Joining the round are Susa Ventures, K5 Global, Credo Ventures, Kaya.vc, Lachy Groom, Ryan Petersen (founder of Flexport), Michael Stoppelman, Emil Eifrem (founder of Neo4j), Zach Sims (founder of Codecademy), Madhu Muthukumar (CPO at Notion), Tim Soulo (CMO at Ahrefs), Oskari Saarenmaa & Hannu Valtonen (founders of Aiven), Lucek Samulowski (co-founder of Docplanner) among others. Better Stack's mission is to help developers in building a better internet by making powerful observability tools that are beautifully designed and a joy to use. Making it easier to ship better and more reliable software faster. Today, developers are using dozens of tools that need integrating, cost a lot, feel like they were designed in the 2000s, and take ages for users to fully comprehend. Better Stack combines monitoring, logging, incident management, status pages, and more into a single platform. It's roughly 10x cheaper yet 10-100x faster than the alternatives and customers are able to keep data in hot storage for longer, thanks to the ClickHouse database. It's intuitive to use for engineering teams as it leverages SQL for data querying. Lastly, Better Stack's focus on Figma-like collaboration allows developers to work together in real-time. Major outages of companies like Atlassian and Cloudflare in early 2022 show that software reliability is still an unsolved problem. Better Stack arrives to help developers with this challenge. Since its launch in 2021, Better Stack is now used by over 70,000 developers and 1,400+ customers. Teams from enterprises including ESET, Decathlon, Time Magazine, and Accenture; startups like Brave and Drata and indie hackers such as Plausible or Buy me a coffee already rely on Better Stack. The Series A investment will support Better Stack's continued growth and allow it to scale the product at a faster pace to help more developers around the world. **Juraj Masar, Better Stack CEO and co-founder commented:**"We lived the daily struggles engineers go through at our previous jobs and with Better Stack we decided to solve at least some of them. We are simply engineers making the tools we always wanted to use." **Veronika Kolejak, Better Stack COO and co-founder said:**"Take 10 engineers off the street and ask them: are you fluent in Datadog Query Language, New Relic Query Language, AWS CloudWatch Query Language, PromQL, LogQL… and 9 out of 10 will say no. But every engineer knows SQL, which is why with Better Stack, we're making it the querying standard for software observability. And this is just one of the decisions we made that makes us 'just work' for so many engineers." **Tomas Hromada, Better Stack CTO added:**"For us, developer tools don't mean they can't be beautifully designed or a joy to use. We think that all users, whether they are indie hackers or CTOs of large corporations, deserve a great experience. Developers do care about working with tools that focus on design and UX as much as they focus on functionality." **Carl Fritjofsson, General Partner at Creandum added:**"At Creandum, we deeply care about product experiences, and Better Stack not only redefined what beautiful and intuitive observability products look like, but ultimately Better Stack customers will be empowered to build better products themselves. With 10x lower cost and 10x better performance we are convinced that Better Stack will become an important part of software infrastructure." ![](https://imagedelivery.net/xZXo0QFi-1_4Zimer-T0XQ/ca408746-3bcc-4a61-5692-37e70c31de00/public =1247x768) ## About Better Stack Better Stack's mission is to help developers in building a better internet by making powerful observability tools that are beautifully designed and a joy to use. Better Stack combines monitoring, logging, incident management, status pages, and more into a single platform. Better Stack is backed by Creandum, Susa Ventures, K5 Global, Credo, Kaya.vc, and Lachy Groom among others. As of 2022 Better Stack has over 70,000 developers and 1,400+ customers including companies like Accenture, Time Magazine, Decathlon, ESET, Brave and Drata. To learn more visit [www.betterstack.com](https://www.betterstack.com/). Better Stack was founded by Juraj Masar and Veronika Kolejak and has a distributed team across the US, Canada, Netherlands, Czechia, Slovakia, and Nigeria. Before joining the company, early team-members worked at Google, Shopify, Productboard, and Pipedrive among others. ## About Creandum Founded in 2003, Creandum is a leading pan-European early-stage venture capital firm. The fund's portfolio of 120+ companies includes some of Europe's most successful tech companies across a wide range of industries including Spotify, Klarna, Depop, Kry, Trade Republic, Pleo, and Vivino. Today, every sixth company is a unicorn. Creandum's advisory teams are based in Stockholm, London, Berlin, and San Francisco and offer extensive operational expertise to support the funds' portfolio companies from seed to exit to become global category leaders. Learn more at www.creandum.com. ## About ClickHouse ClickHouse is a new kind of analytical database that is 100x-1000x faster than traditional approaches. ClickHouse, Inc. spun out of Yandex and raised [$300M in 2021](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211028005287/en/ClickHouse-Raises-250M-Series-B-To-Scale-Groundbreaking-OLAP-Database-Management-System-Globally). ClickHouse's use in observability has been popularized by [Uber engineering implementing ClickHouse](https://eng.uber.com/logging/) internally for log management. Better Stack is now bringing the benefits of ClickHouse via its next-gen reliability platform as a SaaS to everyone.