Ask HN: How did the open-source monitoring service netdata raise 20M?
Today I am very thankful to use the netdata tool to monitor few Kubernetes clusters (https://www.netdata.cloud/). It's a free, open-source on GitHub and useful product. They have wonderful UIs, great quality of code, high performance.
The main issue, as with many open-source projects, is that they have no business model, not event a premium service, and yet they were able to leverage 20M$ from Bain Capital Ventures and Marathon Venture Capital. Considering these funds religiously capitalist, I can't imagine them suddenly having an interest in IT innovation or any altruistic concern to help the rest of the world. At the end, this is a monitoring tool doing the same as its well-established open-source competitors (like prometheus and grafana), therefore, the industry didn't need another monitoring tool.
Is there any business model I don't see? Is it a form of whitewashing, or a simple marketing operation intending to give them more credit and attractiveness? Or, have these VCs really become angels?
-- T. Webber