Observe, a California-based performance management observability platform, raised $70m in a series A-2 round that featured Capital One Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of financial services firm Capital One, to let developers keep an eye on software issues.
Observe provides machine learning-powered tools to help developers and software engineers retain visibility across all the components of an app, including the user-facing interface and the backend development systems, to glean data insights that it turns into actionable datasets.
Observe claims that its platform ingests 40 terabytes of data and executed 25 million queries each day. Over the past year, the company said, it has tripled its customer base and experienced a five-fold increase in its monthly active users.
Sutter Hill Ventures (SHV) and Madrona Ventures filled out the round’s participants to bring the company’s total funding to $114.5m.
With rapidly moving software technology and an increased data flow across the board, it has become easier for development teams to be overwhelmed by new software malfunctions and demand for upgrades, making observability more important.
Bringing together data from different sources and making it digestible has been on the rise as the volume of data businesses need to deal with has been increasing, and corporates have been keen to back technology providers focusing on fixing the problem.
Earlier this month, network services provider Cisco and software company ServiceNow were among the investors in a $63m series B round for data observation company Edge Delta. Financial services firm Citi and cybersecurity technology provider CrowdStrike backed a $200m series C round for data observability platform Cribl in August last year, one month before testing automation technology provider Tricentis backed a $15m series A round for observability software developer DeepFactor.
Capital One Ventures has itself been active in the space, with portfolio companies including data management software developer Okera and, more recently, analytics software provider Thoughtspot.
Jaidev Shergill, managing partner at Capital One Ventures, said: “Observe is tackling a huge problem that site reliability engineers face organising and visualising data from distributed sources to detect and resolve system stability issues.
“Observe’s technical approach, leadership team and traction make the company one of the category leaders.”
Private investor Mike Speiser led a $35m series A equity and debt funding round for the company when it emerged from stealth in late 2020, investing alongside SHV, Michael Dell, Frank Slootman and Scott Dietzen.
Image courtesy of Observe
