Add another $100 million to the steadily growing pile of money being thrown at the software startup New Relic.
Lew Cirne’s New Relic Just Raised Another $100 Million
Lead investors are BlackRock and Passport Capital.
New Relic
The company just announced that it had secured a Series F funding round led by investment firms BlackRock and Passport Capital, with T. Rowe Price and Wellington Management also participating. The round brings the total capital raised at New Relic to $215 million.
Update: I’ve just talked to a source familiar with the terms of the deal who tells Re/code that the deal values New Relic at between $1.2 billion and $1.3 billion.
New Relic — the name is an anagram of the name of CEO Lew Cirne — is a cloud-based application that monitors software for what goes on inside it. Companies use it to figure out what’s going wrong with an application, but have also found it useful to understand the second-by-second click-stream data of Web applications. That has turned into a thoughtful pivot in the direction of analytics, which so many companies consider important in this new age of “Big Data.”
The company also got a big shot in the arm when its name appeared in a report documenting how the Obama administration started turning the tide with the problem-plagued launch of the Healthcare.gov website last year. While the company can’t talk about it, its role in the fix is considered a bit of an open secret that has gone a long way toward helping its reputation.
New Relic’s previous investors include Allen & Company, Benchmark, Dragoneer Investment Group, Insight Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital and Trinity Ventures.
The addition of T. Rowe Price to the stable of investors makes it look like New Relic is starting to rev the engines for an IPO. Its investment in Workday and Facebook were considered strong signals that an IPO was not far in the future.
About that: Cirne will always demur if you ask him about it. But the company has been beefing up its management team and board. In December it lured Hilarie Koplow-McAdams away from Salesforce.com to be its chief revenue officer. It also added Square CFO Sarah Friar to its board in January, and before that it tapped longtime Silicon Valley finance guru Peter Currie for another board seat. After six rounds of funding, it won’t be long now.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
