The company that tells you why your website is slow. New Relic pioneered application performance monitoring — tracking every line of code, every database query, every API call in real time to find bottlenecks. Founded in 2008, IPO'd in 2014, and became the default monitoring tool for a generation of developers. Then Datadog ate their lunch. New Relic went from market leader to underdog, pivoted to a consumption model, and was taken private for $6.5 billion in 2023. The APM pioneer that lost the lead and is fighting to get it back.
Founded
2008
HQ
San Francisco, USA
Total Raised
$214 million
Founder
Lew Cirne
Status
Taken private by Francisco Partners & TPG (2023) for $6.5B
Website
newrelic.comTHE ORIGIN STORY
Lew Cirne had already built one APM company — Wily Technology, which he sold to CA Technologies for $375 million in 2006. In 2008, he started New Relic to do it again, but for the cloud era.
The name is an anagram of his own name (Lew Cirne → New Relic). The platform launched as a SaaS monitoring tool that let developers see how their applications performed in real time — response times, error rates, database queries, everything.
WHAT THEY ACTUALLY DO
Consumption-based pricing. New Relic transitioned from per-host pricing to a usage-based model where customers pay based on data ingested.
The platform offers 30+ capabilities including APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, and synthetic monitoring. One user and 100GB of data per month is free.
Revenue scales with data volume.
THE PRODUCTS
APM (Application Performance Monitoring) — tracks application performance in real time. Infrastructure Monitoring — server and cloud resource visibility.
Log Management — centralized log collection and analysis. Synthetic Monitoring — simulated user testing.
Dashboards & Alerting — custom dashboards and automated alerts.
HOW THEY GREW
Being first to market with cloud-native APM. New Relic was the monitoring tool every startup used.
They went public in 2014 and grew rapidly. The free tier and developer-friendly approach drove bottom-up adoption.
When they struggled, the pivot to consumption-based pricing (inspired by Datadog's model) was the strategic reset.
THE HARD PART
Datadog. New Relic was the APM market leader, but Datadog built a broader observability platform that combined APM, infrastructure monitoring, and logs.
Datadog's stock soared while New Relic stagnated. The competitive pressure, combined with a challenging transition to consumption pricing, led to the go-private deal.
MONEY TRAIL
Series B
2010 · Led by Benchmark Capital
$15M raised
Series C
2012 · Led by Trinity Ventures
$25M raised
IPO
2014 · Led by Public market
$115M raised
$1.8B valuation
Take-Private
2023 · Led by Francisco Partners & TPG
$6.5B raised
$6.5B valuation
WHO BACKED THEM
IPO'd on NYSE in 2014. Pre-IPO investors included Benchmark Capital, Tenaya Capital, and Trinity Ventures.
Taken private by Francisco Partners and TPG for $6.5 billion in November 2023.
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