Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic was founded in April 2010 in Mountain View/Redwood City, California, by Kumar Saurabh and Christian Beedgen, two engineers who had previously worked together at ArcSight, the security information and event management (SIEM) pioneer that HP acquired in 2010. Bruno Kurtic joined as a founding executive (VP of Product/Chief Strategy Officer) and is credited by the company and by Greylock as part of the founding team. The founders' thesis was that as enterprises moved workloads to the cloud, log and machine data would explode in volume and could no longer be managed with on-premises tools like Splunk; Sumo Logic built a multi-tenant, cloud-native ('born in the cloud') log management and analytics service from day one. Greylock Partners was Sumo Logic's first institutional investor, backing the company from its seed round, with partners Joseph Ansanelli and Asheem Chandna leading the investment; Ansanelli joined the board in May 2013 and remained a director through the company's IPO.

Sumo Logic raised a large, multi-round venture program over the 2010s: a Series B of $15 million in January 2012 (as the company exited stealth), continuing through a Series E of $80 million in June 2015 (bringing cumulative VC funding to roughly $160.5 million), a Series F of $75 million in June 2017, and a Series G of $110 million in May 2019 led by Battery Ventures that pushed the company's valuation above $1 billion. Other investors across the company's history included Accel, DFJ Growth, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Sequoia Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Tiger Global Management, and Franklin Templeton, alongside angel investor Shlomo Kramer (also an ArcSight co-founder and later Cato Networks/Imperva founder). Total funding raised prior to IPO is reported at roughly $345 million. Along the way the company evolved from pure log management into a broader 'continuous intelligence' and, later, cloud SIEM/security operations platform, acquiring FactorChain (2015, threat-hunting technology), JASK (February 2019, cloud-native SIEM), and in 2021 both DFLabs (SOAR/security orchestration) and Sensu (open-source monitoring), rounding out its security and observability portfolio.

Sumo Logic went public on the Nasdaq under ticker SUMO on September 17, 2020, pricing its IPO at $22.00 per share (above its marketed range), selling 14.8 million shares for gross proceeds of approximately $325.6 million (net proceeds to the company of about $302.8 million), led by underwriters Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, and RBC Capital Markets. Ramin Sayar, who had become President & CEO in 2014, led the company through the offering; co-founder Christian Beedgen remained CTO and a board director. As a public company, Sumo Logic grew revenue from about $202.6 million (FY2021, ended Jan 31 2021) to $242.1 million (FY2022) to $300.7 million (FY2023), while continuing to post net losses (roughly -$125 million in FY2023) typical of growth-stage SaaS companies, and competed intensely against Datadog, Splunk (later acquired by Cisco), Elastic, New Relic, and Dynatrace in a crowded observability/SIEM market where scale and profitability increasingly mattered to public-market investors.

Business model

B2B SaaS sold via subscription/consumption pricing on a cloud-native, multi-tenant analytics platform; sold directly to enterprises and via channel/MSP and cloud marketplace (AWS, Azure, GCP) partnerships.

Recurring subscription and consumption-based (data ingest volume) revenue; reported as Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) during its public-company years, ~$301.6M ARR as of FY2023 (ended Jan 31, 2023).