Cribl

Cribl was founded in July 2018 in San Francisco by Clint Sharp, Ledion Bitincka, and Dritan Bitincka, three engineering and product leaders who met while working together at Splunk (Sharp also previously worked at Cricket Communications; the Bitincka brothers were architects at Splunk who helped build its core data pipeline and search technology). Frustrated that enterprises were locked into paying per-byte to ingest all their machine data into a single analytics platform, the founders set out to build a vendor-agnostic 'observability pipeline' that would let IT and security teams route, filter, reduce, reshape, and enrich telemetry data before sending it to costly downstream destinations — giving customers choice and control over their data rather than lock-in to any single vendor (implicitly positioning Cribl as complementary to, and later a competitor/frenemy of, Splunk itself).

The company's first product, LogStream (later renamed Cribl Stream), launched publicly in October 2020 alongside a $35M Series B led by Sequoia Capital (with CRV participating), bringing cumulative funding to roughly $46M after earlier seed and Series A rounds. Growth accelerated sharply from there: Cribl raised a $200M Series C in August 2021 co-led by Greylock and Redpoint Ventures (with IVP, Sequoia, CRV, and strategic investors Citi Ventures and CrowdStrike participating), then a $150M Series D in May 2022 led by Tiger Global Management (with IVP, CRV, Redpoint, Sequoia, and Greylock all returning). The Series D round coincided with the launch of Cribl Search, extending the platform from pure data routing into federated search and investigation across telemetry without needing to move or rehydrate data first.

Cribl continued to expand its product suite — Cribl Edge (a lightweight collection/fleet-management agent, launched March 2022), Cribl Lake (turnkey telemetry storage), Cribl Guard (AI-driven sensitive-data detection, 2025), Cribl Copilot Editor and Cribl Lakehouse (2025) — while its relationship with former employer Splunk grew adversarial: Splunk sued Cribl in 2022 over alleged use of Splunk intellectual property in building interoperability features, which Cribl publicly denied, characterizing the suit as an attempt to 'stifle competition through litigation.' By October 2023 Cribl had surpassed $100M in ARR, and in August 2024 it closed an oversubscribed $319M Series E (combining primary and secondary share sales) led by GV (Google Ventures) at a $3.5 billion valuation — roughly 40% above its Series D valuation — with GIC, CapitalG, IVP, and CRV also participating. GV general partner Michael McBride (a former GitLab CRO) joined Cribl's board as part of the round.

Business model

B2B enterprise software sold via subscription/consumption-based SaaS and self-managed licensing to IT and security teams at large enterprises.

Recurring subscription and consumption-based pricing (Cribl.Cloud) plus self-hosted licensing; reported surpassing $300M ARR as of FY'26 (Feb 2026).