With a $6.8M raise, Maryland’s Circonus has eyes on making Philly its HQ

Fulton, Maryland-based machine data intelligence company Circonus, which put serial entrepreneur Bob Moul at its head as CEO in 2019, announced Tuesday that it had raised a $6.8 million Series A1.

The round was lead by Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania-based Osage Partners, and included new investors Bull City Venture Partners out of Durham, North Carolina, and the Philadephia-based Ben Franklin Technology Partners. Also participating is Radnor, Pennsylvania-based NewSpring Capital, which lead Circonus’ Series A.

The company also announced that Moul had taken the CEO position, which Technical.ly reported last October. Moul’s move comes after past lives leading several local tech companies, including Cloudamize and Boomi, to exit.

Theo Schlossnagle, who founded and has led Circonus since 2010, is the company’s CTO, and will remain in Maryland.

Moul told Technical.ly that the raise will mostly go toward accelerating the company’s sales and marketing operations, saying that software companies by nature are pretty “resource efficient,” and that at most, the company will probably only add about six or so employees this year.

Bob Moul. (Courtesy photo)

Fundraising for the round began in August, Moul said, and those who the company approached either “got it right away, or didn’t.”

“When we were raising for Boomi, a lot of people would need clarification on ‘what is integration as a service?’ Explaining what we were doing took a lot of work,” he said. “With Circonus, people really got machine data intelligence.”

In October, the company announced its machine data intelligence platform called Circonus Platform, which can tap into various machines’ data and analyze it for its customers. Think: “anything from servers to robots,” Moul said at the time.

“No other solution can handle the massive scale of data that businesses are dealing with today at the frequency, speed and accuracy that is required for mission-critical IoT and monitoring systems,” said David Drahms, partner at Osage Venture Partners, in a statement. “The timing is right.”

Much of the company’s engineering team is remote, but the raise and Moul’s presence in the Philadelphia area is drawing the company to look for a Philly-area office that will become the company’s HQ. That’ll likely happen some time in 2020, Moul said, and will probably have half a dozen or so employees to start.

“I’m stoked about this raise,” Moul said. “We’re in a massive market and I feel that we’re well positioned for it.”