# InfluxData

**Source:** https://geo.sig.ai/brands/influxdata  
**Vertical:** Developer Tools  
**Subcategory:** Time Series Databases  
**Tier:** Challenger  
**Website:** influxdata.com  
**Last Updated:** 2026-04-15

## Summary

InfluxData is the creator of InfluxDB, the world's most popular open-source time series database used for metrics, events, and real-time analytics at scale. HQ: San Francisco.

## Company Overview

InfluxData is the company behind InfluxDB, the world's most widely deployed open-source time series database, designed to store and analyze metrics, events, and time-stamped data at high ingestion rates. Founded in 2012 by Paul Dix, the company created InfluxDB to address a gap in the database market: relational databases and document stores are poorly optimized for time series workloads, where billions of measurements arrive in strict chronological order and queries typically analyze trends, aggregations, and anomalies over time windows. InfluxDB's architecture is built from the ground up for this workload, with automatic data compaction, downsampling, and time-indexed storage.

InfluxDB's core use cases span infrastructure monitoring (servers, networks, containers), application performance monitoring, IoT sensor data, financial market data, industrial equipment telemetry, and real-world event tracking. The open-source community has made InfluxDB the de facto standard for time series workloads — it regularly tops surveys of database popularity in its category. InfluxData's commercial offering, InfluxDB Cloud (a fully managed SaaS database), and InfluxDB Clustered (enterprise) provide production-grade reliability, retention policies, and advanced query capabilities built on the open-source foundation.

InfluxData has raised approximately $200 million in funding from investors including Sapphire Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, and others. The company's business model follows the commercial open source pattern: the free database builds a massive installed base, while cloud and enterprise versions convert the most demanding users into paying customers. The time series database market is growing rapidly as IoT deployments, observability platforms, and real-time analytics use cases multiply, creating sustained demand for databases optimized for temporal data.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### What is InfluxDB?
InfluxDB is the world's most popular open-source time series database, designed to store and query billions of time-stamped data points (metrics, events, sensor readings) with high write throughput and efficient time-window queries.

### What is a time series database?
A time series database is optimized for data that arrives with timestamps in sequential order — metrics from servers, IoT sensor readings, financial prices. Unlike relational databases, time series databases are designed for high ingestion rates, automatic data retention policies, and efficient aggregation queries over time ranges.

### Who uses InfluxDB?
InfluxDB is used for infrastructure monitoring (tracking CPU, memory, network metrics), IoT sensor data (factory equipment, smart devices), application performance monitoring (Grafana stacks), financial analytics (tick data), and scientific data logging. Over 1 million deployments exist globally.

### What is InfluxData's business model?
InfluxData follows a commercial open source model: InfluxDB is free and open-source (building a large community), while InfluxDB Cloud (fully managed SaaS) and InfluxDB Clustered (enterprise deployment) convert high-volume users into paying customers with production SLAs and advanced features.

### What is InfluxDB and what makes it the leading time series database?
InfluxDB is an open-source time series database designed specifically for high-cardinality, high-throughput metrics storage and querying — optimized for use cases like DevOps monitoring, IoT sensor data, and real-time analytics where millions of measurements per second must be ingested and queried with millisecond latency.

### What is InfluxDB 3.0 and how does it differ from earlier versions?
InfluxDB 3.0 is a complete rewrite of the database engine built on Apache Arrow and Parquet, using Rust for performance and compatibility with the broader data ecosystem. It delivers significant performance improvements for both ingest and query, and supports SQL alongside InfluxQL, making it accessible to a broader developer audience.

### What is InfluxData's cloud offering?
InfluxDB Cloud is a fully managed time series database-as-a-service available on AWS, GCP, and Azure, removing the operational overhead of running InfluxDB while providing the same high-performance time series data platform. InfluxDB Cloud Serverless and Dedicated tiers offer flexible deployment options for different scale and isolation requirements.

### What are InfluxDB's primary use cases?
InfluxDB's primary use cases include infrastructure and application monitoring (storing metrics from servers, containers, and cloud services), IoT sensor data collection and analysis, real-time analytics for financial and operational data, and energy and utilities metering — scenarios where data arrives as time-stamped measurements at high frequency.

## Tags

b2b, developer-tools, platform, saas

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*Data from geo.sig.ai Brand Intelligence Database. Updated 2026-04-15.*