The Pipeline Between What Data Costs and What It's Worth
Every quarter, a Fortune 500 CISO sits in a budget review trying to explain why the company is spending more on data storage than on the analysts who look at it. Clint Sharp figured out, years before the market caught on, that the problem wasn't the tool at the end - it was the pipe in the middle.
Sharp is the co-founder and CEO of Cribl, a San Francisco-based data infrastructure company now valued at $3.5 billion. Cribl builds what the industry calls an observability pipeline - software that sits between the firehose of machine-generated data (logs, metrics, traces, events) and wherever that data is supposed to land. Route it here, filter that, compress this, redact those tokens before they ever leave the building. That's Cribl. That's Sharp's bet.
The timing was not accidental. Sharp spent five years as Senior Director of Product Management at Splunk, long enough to understand both the product's power and its ceiling. Splunk was extraordinary at analysis. But the moment enterprises had to decide what to feed it, the economics broke. Data volumes were growing at 28% compound annually. Storage costs were not falling fast enough. Every new data source felt like a new tax.
"Cribl exists to give IT and security teams choice and control of their data, which has become increasingly more critical as data volumes skyrocket."- Clint Sharp
In 2017, Sharp left Splunk with brothers Dritan and Ledion Bitincka - colleagues who had been living inside the same problem from the engineering side. They co-founded Cribl on March 1, 2017. The founding thesis: give enterprises a vendor-agnostic routing layer that runs before the analytics bill arrives.
Seven years later, the thesis is a company with over 1,100 employees, customers in 43 of the Fortune 100, and $200M+ in annual recurring revenue - one of the fastest infrastructure software companies to reach that number in history. Total funding: over $590 million.
From Stealth to $200M ARR
Cribl raised its seed round from CRV in 2019. By 2021, it had closed a $200M Series C. The company had chosen a model - the "Switzerland" of data platforms, in Sharp's words - that meant Cribl didn't compete with Splunk, Elastic, Datadog, or any of the tools its customers were already paying for. It made all of them work better. That neutrality was the product's stickiness.
Cribl crossed $100M ARR in 2023, marking one of the fastest climbs to that milestone in infrastructure software history. By August 2024, Sharp had closed a $319M Series E led by Google Ventures and CapitalG, pushing the total to over $590M raised and the valuation to $3.5B - a 40% increase from the Series D in 2022. In January 2025, Fortune confirmed Cribl had crossed $200M ARR, with roughly 70% year-over-year growth.
The growth has not been frictionless. In mid-2024, Cribl missed its Q1 revenue targets. Sharp's response was characteristic: he stepped in personally as interim Chief Revenue Officer, restructured territory allocation, and rethought rep hiring. He described the dual role with characteristic directness - noting, with his signature dry wit, that they did, in fact, have a cowboy hat for the occasion. The company recovered. The Q1 stumble became a case study in a CEO who treats problems as personal accountability, not organizational noise.
"To grow by 70% to 80% this year, we have to have the right number of bodies sitting in the right places... Software's a people business."- Clint Sharp, Fortune (2025)
Customers purchasing multiple Cribl products increased 275% year-over-year as of late 2024. Sharp's multi-product vision - starting with LogStream (now Cribl Stream) and expanding into Cribl Search, Cribl Edge, and Cribl Lake - has converted what began as a routing tool into a platform customers build workflows around. Nearly half of the Fortune 50 run Cribl in production.
Cribl's Revenue Arc
Approximate ARR milestones. Sources: Fortune, Cribl press releases.
From Fort Smith to Fort Knox
Sharp grew up in Fort Smith, Arkansas - a small city on the border of Oklahoma that is, by any measure, far from Silicon Valley in both geography and disposition. He studied Business Management at Metropolitan State University of Denver, then went straight into network engineering in the late 1990s, riding the early internet build-out at Internet Partners of America.
He spent the early 2000s as Director of Networking and Chief Software Architect at a retail tech company, then briefly founded his own firm, Aggregate Technology Solutions. By 2006, he had moved into telecommunications, leading application operations at Cricket Communications (Leap Wireless) for six years - building fluency in the kind of high-volume, always-on systems that would later be Cribl's natural habitat.
The Splunk chapter started in 2012 and ran until 2017. As Senior Director of Product Management, Sharp led product work for Splunk Cloud and big data offerings - the five years that gave him both the network to co-found something and the specific pain point to build around. He was not building Cribl against Splunk. He was building the thing he wished had existed while he was at Splunk.
"We were remote first even before COVID and I think it's the future of work."- Clint Sharp
Sharp has spoken candidly about the moments when CEO instincts misfire at scale. When Cribl was a handful of engineers, he could file a bug report on Slack without ceremony. As headcount climbed past hundreds, a CEO bug report carried institutional weight. New employees read it as a five-alarm signal to change everything. He had to learn, as he put it, how to add caveats - a small story that captures the adjustment every founder eventually makes when the company is no longer shaped by proximity to them alone.
In May 2026, Sharp appeared on CNBC's Fortt Knox to discuss the next inflection: agentic AI. His read was measured rather than evangelical. Customers know they need a strategy. Legal and security teams are not ready. The infrastructure play - cloud-native lakehouses and elastic compute that scales CPU/GPU 1:1 with agent rollout - is Cribl's answer to the question enterprises are still forming.
Clint Sharp on Building, Leading, and Data
"A really great investor is that person who holds you accountable to make sure things are going right."
On investor partnerships"We will eventually be a public company. At minimum, I'd say it's two years away."
On IPO plans, 2025"It's best just to go straight at solving those problems."
On tackling company challenges"Software's a people business."
On scaling go-to-market, FortuneWhat He's Built
- Co-founded Cribl - valued at $3.5B at Series E
- Grew to $200M+ ARR with 163% compound annual growth
- 43 Fortune 100 & 130 Fortune 500 customers
- Forbes Cloud 100, ranked #37 (2025)
- America's Best Startup Employers 2025
- Raised $319M Series E from GV & CapitalG
- Total funding exceeds $590 million
- Co-founded GOAT Investments for early-stage entrepreneurs