InfluxData

Market position

InfluxDB is listed as the number one time series database according to DB-Engines, with reported figures of more than one billion downloads, over one million live open source instances, more than five billion Telegraf downloads and over 2,800 open source contributors. As of 2023 the company reported 1,900 paying customers and hundreds of thousands of open source users. Competing time series databases include GE's proprietary Predix, TimescaleDB, Amazon Timestream, and offerings from AWS and Microsoft.

InfluxData emphasizes an architecture purpose-built for continuous, high-velocity time series data rather than general-purpose databases, combining fast ingest, columnar storage via Apache Arrow and Parquet, and SQL support through DataFusion. Its ability to link cloud-based databases with edge-based databases was described as an advantage over time series database offerings from AWS and Microsoft, and InfluxDB is listed as the top-ranked time series database by DB-Engines.

Technology

InfluxDB's IOx storage engine uses Apache Arrow for in-memory columnar data representation, Apache Parquet for moving data to external storage, and Apache DataFusion to add SQL support, with Apache Flight SQL in the surrounding stack. The platform provides high-speed ingest of millions of series, real-time transformation and analytics, automatic eviction of cold data into lakes and warehouses, and compression and downsampling into Parquet files. Telegraf is the companion data collection agent, and client libraries exist for Python, JavaScript, Go, C# and Java.

Go-to-market

Distribution is led by open source adoption of InfluxDB and Telegraf, supported by developer documentation, client libraries, community forums and technical papers, with self-service trials and downloads alongside a direct sales motion for commercial cloud and enterprise deployments.

Developers and organizations operating systems that generate continuous high-resolution data, including industrial IoT (about half of customers as of 2023), aerospace, energy and utilities, manufacturing, and infrastructure and systems monitoring teams. Tesla was named as a customer.

Geography

InfluxData, Inc. lists an address at 548 Market St, PMB 77953, San Francisco, CA 94104. Cloud services are offered on regional public cloud infrastructure, including US East on AWS.

History

The company was described in 2023 as ten years old and had by then raised $171 million in total. Its earlier commercial pitch was the TICK stack (Telegraf, Chronograf, Kapacitor and InfluxDB), which did not take hold; the company subsequently repositioned around an Apache Arrow, Flight SQL, DataFusion and Parquet based architecture underpinning its IOx storage engine. The current product generation is InfluxDB 3.

Risks & controversies

In 2023 the company's CEO framed the funding as a means to reach profitability through what he expected to be a difficult period for technology investment, targeting profitability within two years and not anticipating a near-term public listing. A portion of the 2023 financing was debt, in the form of a $30 million facility from Silicon Valley Bank.