{"slug": "groundcover-raises-100m-to-build-observability-for-the-ai-era", "title": "groundcover raises $100M to build observability for the AI era", "summary": "Observability startup groundcover has raised $100 million in a Series C round led by One Peak, with Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and existing backers participating, bringing total funding to $160 million. The company says it tripled annual recurring revenue and doubled headcount in the past year, and plans to use the capital to expand its go-to-market operations in North America, develop more AI features, and deepen its partner programme. CEO Shahar Azulay said the company aims to \"change the way engineers and agents collaborate to bring true autonomy into production operations.", "body_md": "[groundcover](https://www.groundcover.com), an observability startup that keeps customers’ monitoring data inside their own cloud, has raised $100 million in a Series C round.\n\nThe 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 taking part.\n\nThe 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, the sort of trajectory that tends to precede a larger cheque.\n\ngroundcover sells observability, the software engineers use to watch what their systems are doing in production. Its pitch is architectural: rather than shipping telemetry off to a vendor’s cloud, it runs inside the customer’s own environment under a* “bring your own cloud”* model, keeping the data private and, the company argues, cheaper to hold.\n\nThe technical hook is eBPF. The company’s sensor uses the Linux kernel technology to capture full-fidelity telemetry across infrastructure, applications, and AI workloads without code changes or sampling, then pairs it with native support for OpenTelemetry, the open instrumentation standard.\n\nThat combination has been the company’s wedge against incumbents such as [Datadog](https://thenextweb.com/news/datadog-secures-62m-in-funding-from-index-ventures-and-rtp-ventures) since its earlier rounds.\n\nThe case groundcover makes is that observability is buckling under AI. Telemetry volumes are doubling every few months as teams adopt cloud-native tools and now demand deeper visibility into models and agentic workflows, and legacy platforms respond, it argues, by forcing customers to sample or throttle their data.\n\ngroundcover’s own product answer is Agent Mode. Chief executive Shahar Azulay describes it as an agentic layer that helps engineers surface, troubleshoot, and remediate problems in production, and frames the round as a bet on engineers and AI agents working the same data.\n\n*“We are the only platform to harness the potential of eBPF with the endless power of BYOC for observability,”* Azulay said.\n\nHe added that the company plans to *“change the way engineers and agents collaborate to bring true autonomy into production operations,”* language that leans hard into the autonomous-operations theme the money is meant to fund.\n\nOne Peak, a London-based growth firm that backs European and Israeli software companies, led the deal and took the customary conviction line.\n\n*“The AI era demands a completely different observability architecture, and groundcover is the only company that has built it,”* said David Klein, its co-founder and managing partner.\n\nThe numbers offered to support that are groundcover’s own. The company reports more than 250 paying customers, ranging from early-stage startups to a Fortune 5 enterprise, more than 3x year-on-year ARR growth, and several seven-figure deals closed in the past twelve months, figures that have not been independently audited.\n\nThe capital is aimed mostly at North America. groundcover says most of it will go into its go-to-market operation, where it claims to be displacing legacy incumbents at a growing pace, with the rest funding expansion into new geographies, a deeper partner programme with cloud providers, and more AI features.\n\nFounded in 2021 and based in Tel Aviv, groundcover is now several rounds into a pitch that has not changed much: that the incumbents built observability to reduce data, and the AI era will reward whoever can afford to keep all of it. The Series C is the market, for now, agreeing that the bet is worth $100 million more.\n\n## Get the TNW newsletter\n\nGet the most important tech news in your inbox each week.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/groundcover-raises-100m-to-build-observability-for-the-ai-era", "canonical_source": "https://thenextweb.com/news/groundcover-raises-100m-to-build-observability-for-the-ai-era", "published_at": "2026-07-29 12:00:22+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-29 13:03:59.627725+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-infrastructure", "ai-startups", "ai-tools", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["groundcover", "One Peak", "Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital", "Zeev Ventures", "Angular Ventures", "Heavybit", "Jibe", "Shahar Azulay"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/groundcover-raises-100m-to-build-observability-for-the-ai-era", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/groundcover-raises-100m-to-build-observability-for-the-ai-era.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/groundcover-raises-100m-to-build-observability-for-the-ai-era.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/groundcover-raises-100m-to-build-observability-for-the-ai-era.jsonld"}}