Instana, the first monitoring solution to apply both automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to fully automate all aspects of application performance management (APM), today announced it has raised a $20 million Series B investment led by Accel, with participation from existing investor Target Partners. This brings the company's total funding to $27 million to date. The funding will be used to grow the company's ability to fulfill the demand from across global markets and expand the development of its products.

Companies are increasingly relying on container and cloud technologies to deploy highly dynamic software applications, which require new management solutions. Since its inception, Instana has received strong interest from enterprises worldwide that have become frustrated with the limitations of current solutions' abilities to keep up with the high rate of application change, visualize containerized environments, understand performance and analyze impact.

Through innovations in real-time analysis and the application of AI, Instana has delivered a solution that represents the new era of APM monitoring designed from the ground up to work in modern application environments. By facilitating high speed agile development and operations, Instana is leading the way into the next-generation of management tools, enabling IT to deliver services more quickly and efficiently, and better manage business-critical applications in containerized environments.

The APM market grew 13% in 2016, according to Gartner Market Share Analysis: Performance Analysis Software, Worldwide, 2016. * As enterprise businesses continue to rapidly adopt cloud technologies and with the wave of IoT firmly on the horizon, the APM industry is expected to reach $5.6 billion by 2020, Gartner reported in Forecast: Enterprise Software Markets, Worldwide, 2014-2021, 1Q17 Update.**

"Since our incubation in Germany, Instana focused on delivering to the needs of monitoring today's modern dynamic application environments," said Mirko Novakovic, Instana founder and CEO. "By providing a unique AI-powered solution, we've succeeded in driving rapid customer adoption, having been deployed at nearly 100 enterprise customers globally in just 10 months. The addition of Accel to our existing investor, Target Partners, is another strong endorsement; their guidance and support will be critical as Instana continues to scale, mature and succeed."

Instana's customers are large organizations across multiple industries, including financial services, healthcare, retail, communications and cloud-based service providers such as Edmunds.com, Sixt, iOFFICE, Audi, Trusted Shops and ClearScore. Instana recently announced intelligent analysis of AWS products and AI-powered health management of the increasingly ubiquitous container orchestration platform, Kubernetes.

"Through the use of Instana's AI powered monitoring solution, Audi's DevOps team was given immediate and precise visibility into our new containerized fast data platform," said Florian Schwensfeier, Audi Executive of Development car2x, Dataplatform and Dataanalytics. "Instana's unique solution is allowing our teams to rapidly deliver next generation services to our consumers and confidently deliver them with high quality."

"Across industries, businesses large and small continue to make application monitoring and engineering for speed top priorities. Instana's solution delivers the capabilities organizations need to accelerate the development of customized software to optimize and grow their business. Highly-technical and knowledgeable experts with decades of experience in the APM market, the Instana team collectively shares a vision of what is needed to manage the performance of today's dynamic applications," said Harry Nelis, Partner, Accel, who will join the board. "We look forward to partnering closely with Instana to help drive further growth."

"Instana's founders had a global vision from inception of how to effectively manage today's dynamic applications. This vision combines core research and R&D capabilities from the team in Germany with an experienced sales and marketing team in Silicon Valley. Through this holistic approach, the company addresses the key requirements of global enterprises seeking to leverage dynamic applications as part of their business growth strategy. We could not be happier with the market's response to Instana," said Target Partners co-founder and partner Dr. Berthold von Freyberg.

* Gartner Market Share Analysis: Performance Analysis Software, Worldwide, 2016, Federico De Silva, June 2, 2017.

** Forecast: Enterprise Software Markets, Worldwide, 2014-2021, 1Q17 Update, March 20, 2017.

About Instana:

As the leading provider of Application Performance Management solutions for containerized microservice applications, Instana applies automation and artificial intelligence to deliver the visibility needed to effectively manage the performance of today's dynamic applications across the DevOps lifecycle. Founded by application monitoring veterans, Instana provides AI-powered APM to help organizations deliver high performance applications today and in the future. Visit us at https://instana.com to learn more.

About Accel

Accel is a leading venture capital firm that invests in people and their companies from the earliest days through all phases of private company growth. Atlassian, Algolia, Avito, Cloudera, Crowdstrike, Deliveroo, DJI, Dropbox, Etsy, Facebook, Flipkart, Funding Circle, Kayak, QlikTech, Slack, Spotify, Supercell and WorldRemit are among the companies the firm has backed over the past 30 years. The firm seeks to understand entrepreneurs as individuals, appreciate their originality and play to their strengths. Because greatness doesn't have a stereotype. For more, visit www.accel.com, www.facebook.com/accel or www.twitter.com/accel.

About Target

With 300 euros million under management, Target Partners is one of the leading early-stage venture capital firms in Germany. Target Partners invests in new startup and early-stage companies, and supports them with venture capital during their build-out and expansion phases. With many years of experience as managers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, the team at Target Partners supports entrepreneurs in developing and marketing products and services, building organizations, raising money and taking companies public in Europe and the United States.