Israeli observability software startup Groundcover has raised US$35 million in a series B funding round led by Zeev Ventures, with participation from Angular Ventures, Heavybit, and Jibe Ventures.

This funding brings the company’s total investment to US$60 million since it was founded in 2021.

Groundcover aims to offer enterprises an alternative to established monitoring platforms such as Datadog, New Relic, and Grafana Cloud.

The company provides a solution that allows on-premise data control while maintaining the convenience of a managed service.

Using extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) technology, Groundcover enables high-performance monitoring directly from the Linux kernel. This approach delivers insights into infrastructure and application metrics without the need for code instrumentation.

🔗 Source: Calcalist

🧠 Food for thought

1️⃣ The rising cost burden of observability is fueling market disruption

The observability market is experiencing significant churn due to escalating costs from incumbent platforms, creating an opportunity for groundcover’s approach.

Commercial observability solutions have become notorious for unpredictable pricing, with many organizations reporting that costs can consume 5-10% of cloud budgets as data volumes grow exponentially1.

This financial pressure explains why several competitors like Chronosphere claim to reduce observability costs by over 85% through selective data ingestion2, while Coralogix advertises “full-stack observability at 70% less cost”3.

The pricing challenge has become so significant that by 2024, many enterprises began actively seeking alternatives to established platforms, with cost-efficiency being the primary driver according to industry analysis4.

This cost sensitivity provides the opening for groundcover’s “bring your own cloud” approach, which addresses both the financial concerns and data sovereignty issues that larger enterprises face when managing observability at scale.

2️⃣ Shift from proprietary to open standards reshaping observability landscape

OpenTelemetry is fundamentally changing how observability tools are built and adopted, creating space for challengers like groundcover to enter a previously entrenched market.

The standard emerged from the merger of OpenTracing and OpenCensus and is predicted to be used by over 70% of organizations for application monitoring by 20265, signaling a major shift away from vendor-specific instrumentation.