Observability has become a critical part of engineering teams, going beyond DevOps and SRE teams. But many organizations struggle with the complexity, cost, and security implications of traditional observability solutions. That’s where a startup called groundcover is challenging industry giants like Datadog and New Relic with a revolutionary and simplified approach to cloud-native observability.

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in London, we caught up with Shahar Azulay, Co-Founder and CEO of groundcover, to talk about the startup’s vision, product strategy, and their fresh $60M Series B funding round that’s supercharging their next phase of growth.

For modern developers, observability is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. But the current landscape, according to Azulay, is deeply flawed. Traditional platforms are bloated, expensive, and often require intrusive instrumentation and painful tradeoffs. Teams struggle with hidden costs, security concerns, and limited coverage.

The company tackles two key observability challenges: the complexity of code instrumentation and the limitations of traditional SaaS pricing models. “Observability is clearly a very complex data problem—one of the heaviest data domains in the world,” Azulay explained. “Most of our customers previously couldn’t afford to turn on APM due to the pricing model. With groundcover, 100% of them get full APM out of the box.”

groundcover’s Differentiator: Built for Devs, With Devs in Mind

These challenges often force teams to make difficult trade-offs about what data they can afford to collect and store, ultimately limiting their visibility into system performance. groundcover differentiates itself through two key innovations:

• eBPF-Based Data Collection: Instead of requiring manual code instrumentation, groundcover leverages eBPF, a kernel-based technology that seamlessly collects comprehensive data. “We use eBPF to solve it—a revolutionary kernel-based technology that basically allows us to collect all the data you would expect from an APM without involving developers in the loop. Everything is installed in about 60 seconds, and that’s very powerful product approach,” says Azulay.
• Bring Your Own Cloud Architecture: Unlike traditional SaaS observability platforms, groundcover deploys its backend into the customer’s own cloud environment.

“We store and manage our backend and data within the customer’s cloud environment, offering a fully managed experience. This essentially allows us to avoid pricing by data volume and lets customers store more data with a much saner, scalable pricing model for the future,” Azulay explains. “We’re the only ones in the market doing bring-your-own-cloud observability right now,” Azulay emphasized. “That lets customers store 5x more data and get better value—without compromising on cost or security.”

Why It Matters to Developers

groundcover’s approach is designed for the reality developers live in today. You want fast insights, minimal overhead, and a pricing model that doesn’t penalize you for caring about your own infrastructure.

Azulay put it plainly: “Every time a customer evaluates groundcover, they discover things they didn’t know were failing. They didn’t have traces before. They didn’t have error rates. We change that.”

The platform also eliminates the “sample or go broke” dilemma. With traditional tools, teams often disable telemetry or skip environments to control costs. groundcover’s BYOC and flat pricing let devs capture everything, everywhere—dev, staging, prod.

Taking on the Big Dogs (and Winning)

groundcover isn’t just nibbling at the edges—they’re going straight for Datadog’s lunch. Their roadmap covers all major observability pillars: infrastructure monitoring, APM, logs, real user monitoring, and more. They’re not afraid to say: “We replace Datadog. We replace New Relic. We’re building a better stack.”

And they’re backing that claim with serious funding. At KubeCon, groundcover announced its Series B round, bringing its total to $60 million. The investment will fuel expansion in the U.S. and accelerate feature development—especially around AI-powered insights and enhanced Kubernetes monitoring.

What’s Next: AI Meets BYOC

groundcover is doubling down on smart observability. Its upcoming releases will leverage AI for log anomalies, dynamic data exploration, and even LLM observability—letting teams monitor their AI workloads with the same precision as traditional apps.

And crucially, all AI processing happens within the customer’s own cloud environment, preserving privacy and control, “You might not want OpenAI or Datadog sifting through your logs. We do all of that AI analysis in your VPC.” groundcover is proving that innovation doesn’t have to mean complexity.

With eBPF, BYOC, and a dev-first mindset, they’re turning observability from a chore into a strategic asset. And as the demand for deeper insights and AI-native infrastructure grows, they’re perfectly positioned to lead the charge. If you’re a developer tired of slow agents, ballooning costs, or black-box platforms, groundcover might just be the breath of fresh air you’ve been waiting for.