Groundcover Raises $100M to Build Observability for the AI Era
groundcover, an observability startup that keeps customers’ monitoring data inside their own cloud, has raised $100 million in a Series C round. The financing was led by the growth investor One Peak, with Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and existing backers Zeev Ventures, Angular Ventures, Heavybit, and Jibe also participating.
The round brings the company’s total funding to $160 million. It follows a year in which groundcover says it tripled annual recurring revenue and doubled its headcount, indicating a promising trajectory.
groundcover sells observability software that enables engineers to monitor their systems in production. Its unique selling point is an architectural approach: instead of sending telemetry data to a third-party cloud, it runs inside the customer’s environment under a "bring your own cloud" model, ensuring data privacy and potential cost savings.
The Technical Edge: eBPF and OpenTelemetry
The technical hook is eBPF, a Linux kernel technology that captures full-fidelity telemetry across infrastructure, applications, and AI workloads without code changes or sampling. groundcover combines this with native support for OpenTelemetry, the open instrumentation standard. This combination sets them apart from incumbents like Datadog.
Addressing AI’s Impact on Observability
groundcover argues that traditional observability platforms struggle to keep up with the rapid growth of telemetry volumes under AI, as teams adopt cloud-native tools and demand deeper insights into models and agentic workflows. They believe their platform is specifically tailored to meet these challenges.
Agent Mode: Empowering Engineers and AI Agents
CEO Shahar Azulay describes groundcover’s product, Agent Mode, as an agentic layer that helps engineers troubleshoot and remediate issues in production. He emphasizes the collaboration between engineers and AI agents on the same data, positioning it as a key differentiator.
"We are the only platform to harness the potential of eBPF with the endless power of BYOC for observability," Azulay stated.
Growth Strategy and Funding Focus
One Peak, a London-based growth firm investing in European and Israeli software companies, led the deal, expressing their conviction: "The AI era demands a completely different observability architecture, and groundcover is the only company that has built it."
groundcover provides impressive numbers to back its claim:
- Over 250 paying customers, ranging from early-stage startups to Fortune 5 enterprises.
- More than 3x year-on-year ARR growth.
- Several seven-figure deals closed in the past twelve months (unverified independently).
The capital will primarily be allocated to North America, indicating a strategic focus on this market.