Observe—a SaaS observability company reinventing how machine-generated data is stored, managed, and analyzed—announced Project Voyager, its most significant product update yet. The company also announced the closing of $145 million in Series B funding, with the most recent investments by Evolution Equity Partners and Madrona Ventures. Madrona Managing Director Soma Somasegar also joins Observe’s board of directors, effective immediately.
Voyager also introduces an AI Investigator and OpenTelemetry-Native APM and Snowflake Observability, enabling Engineering, DevOps, and SRE teams to troubleshoot incidents faster and improve customer experience. Traditional logging, monitoring, and APM tools are too complex, failing to curb skyrocketing costs and mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) of incidents for modern distributed applications.
In contrast, Observe continues to simplify and deliver a single observability product for all telemetry data and tooling and a unique AI-powered approach to troubleshooting, providing on-call engineers with the information they need when needed.
Observe’s AI Investigator orchestrates a network of domain-specific AI agents, helping engineers quickly identify and resolve issues. The AI agents are finely tuned for specific tasks such as accessing runbooks or prior incidents, understanding Kubernetes, AWS, or Github, or generating queries to interact with Observe. When incidents are resolved, summaries are generated and used to train the AI agents so they get smarter over time.
AI Agents are orchestrated by a master AI Planner, which drives the troubleshooting workflow. And this can be thought of as a digital companion or assistant to the on-call engineer.
Project Voyager’s OpenTelemetry-Native APM provides immediate visibility into the services, traces and spans of all applications instrumented using the OpenTelemetry standard. And unlike many legacy vendors, Observe uses the upstream OpenTelemetry agent for instrumentation – nothing proprietary is included.
Observe also released Trace Explorer earlier this year and added to that with Service Explorer and Service Level Management. And teams can now align their observability practices with customer experiences by setting Service Level Objectives with a single click and proactively tracking the consumption of error budgets. Observe’s architecture enables users to retain more traces for more extended periods. Some vendors will downsample traces to as little as 1% and keep them for as little as 15 minutes. Plus, Observe does not downsample traces by default and retains all tracing data for 13 months.
Voyager introduces Snowflake Observability and now available in the Snowflake Marketplace and offers 1TiB/month of Snowflake data for free. And this integration allows developers to gain critical insights into query performance and application health without moving telemetry data outside of Snowflake, ensuring maximum security and efficiency.
This announcement also caps a period of exponential growth for Observe, with Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) up over 200% year-over-year and Net Revenue Retention (NRR) over 190% at the end of the first half of FY25. And the Series B funding round will be used to build out engineering and sales functions further to keep pace with growth expectations in the year’s second half.
Observe now serves nearly 100 customers, including large enterprises such as Capital One and Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
KEY QUOTES:
“The introduction today of Observe APM fulfills the original vision we had for Observe – to ingest data into a single data lake, analyze it using a single query language and access it through a single consistent user interface. Next, Observe’s AI Investigator clearly outlines our vision for the future – a world in which a network of intelligent agents will work on behalf of, and in conjunction with, on-call engineers to further reduce MTTR.”
-Jeremy Burton, CEO of Observe
“There is immense opportunity in leveraging AI for the modern observability industry. Observe’s AI-powered investigation features are a promising addition to this growing market.”
-Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk
“We make guarantees that not a single byte of our customers’ data leaves their Snowflake accounts. So it is important to us that our Observability data remains in Snowflake. We chose Observe for its native integrations with Snowflake, OpenTelemetry support and cost efficiencies.”
-Molham Aref, CEO of Relational AI
“Observe was the first to recognize that Observability was fundamentally a data problem and have taken a unique approach. The economics and speed of troubleshooting that Observe has pioneered for current modern IT stacks with massive data scale and growth promises to be a game changer. We are thrilled to support them as they continue to scale.”
-Karthik Subramanian, Partner at Evolution Equity Partners
