Honeycomb's tooling enables software developers to debug live software applications, especially those using a microservice architecture.[5][1] Honeycomb accepts telemetry from applications instrumented with the OpenTelemetry SDKs.[6][7] Structured JSON data also can be accepted, as well as data from Honeycomb's custom integrations.[8] Honeycomb offers metrics and tracing visualizations as well as AI-assisted debugging capabilities.[9][3][10][11][12] The underlying software is a proprietary columnar database running on Amazon Web Services. Amazon has promoted the company as an early adopter of the Graviton family of ARM processors.[13][14]
Honeycomb appeared on the Thoughtworks Radar in 2019 and 2020.[15] Analyst firm Gartner named Honeycomb as a leader in its 2022 and 2023 APM and observability Magic Quadrant reports.[16][17]
File:Observability for emerging infra- Charity Majors.webm
Honeycomb was founded in 2016 in San Francisco[5] by Charity Majors and Christine Yen, both of whom were engineers at Parse (later acquired by Facebook).[1][18] After the acquisition of Parse by Facebook, Yen proposed to Majors that they found a startup together. Majors wanted to build a tool that fixes problems with live applications running in the cloud, inspired by the Scuba in-memory analytics tool they had used at Facebook.[19]
Investors invested $4 million in seed money,[18] followed by $11M in Series A funding in 2019[1] and $20M in Series B funding in 2020.[2] In 2021, Honeycomb announced a $50M Series C funding round.[3][20] In 2023, Honeycomb announced that it had raised an additional $50 million in Series D funding, for a total of $150 million in funding to-date.[4][21]
In December 2021, Honeycomb began an experiment in co-determination by appointing an employee representative to its board of directors, an uncommon governance practice for a United States company.[22][23] As of 2023, the executive team, board, and employees of Honeycomb are each at least half women and non-binary, making the company unusually gender diverse for a technology startup.[21][24]