Tel Aviv, Sept. 14, 2022 – groundcover, a start up focused on cloud-native application monitoring, announces today it raised $24.5M in funding: $4.5M in seed funding and $20M in a Series A round.
The A series was led by Zeev Ventures joined by previous investors Angular Ventures, Heavybit and Jibe Ventures. The funds will be used for further product development. Founded in 2021, groundcover uses eBPF to help teams monitor their K8s applications effortlessly, at scale, by pinpointing bleeding issues and providing insights to solve them much faster.
APM (Application Performance Monitoring) is a technology that has been around for a decade, yet it has become infeasible for many companies needing application monitoring today: it is hard to integrate, impossible to scale, and offers an expensive full-blown tracing system, or nothing at all. Estimated at over $50 billion, observability is one of the largest and fastest-growing markets in infrastructure software, with teams willing to allocate up to 10% of their IT spend to observability. Giant companies have been leading the APM sector, yet due to growing data volumes and intricate technology stacks, the cost has risen and these solutions have become hard to integrate and demanding to maintain. The result is clear: over 70% of teams do not have an APM tier in place (DevOps Pulse 2022).
eBPF was first introduced in 2014 and allows programs to run directly in an isolated virtual machine inside the Linux kernel. In the last 24 months, eBPF has evolved to solve new use cases, becoming the next great promise in fields like network infrastructure, security and observability. groundcover utilizes eBPF to provide deep Kubernetes observability, using it to trace any type of event – from network and infrastructure, all the way to services and applications running in the user space. By using eBPF to collect observability data straight from the Linux kernel, groundcover requires no R&D efforts in the process. Together with a unique edge-compute approach to collect data efficiently, groundcover covers everything yet stores only what matters. The result is super-granular yet scalable visibility into what’s really happening inside a Kubernetes cluster.
Every code crashes. groundcover exposes the root cause of the crash instantly by monitoring 100% of the production stack covering every application, legacy code, side car or 3rd party component, with no blind spots. groundcover taps into all application logs, metrics, traces and Kubernetes events with zero code changes and instantaneous integration.
“The APM space is thirsty for innovation and I am psyched to be introducing eBPF into this space. We are so confident that groundcover redefines observability, that we’ve taken the unconventional approach of offering a robust free tier from day one,” says Shahar Azulay, CEO and Co-Founder of groundcover. “groundcover breaks the visibility-cost tradeoff, ensuring teams don’t have to compromise on visibility depth to manage budgets responsibly. We’ve made it our mission to allow them to get the most out of APM at a fraction of the existing cost in the market today.”
“Every once in a while there comes a tool that turns what used to be months of labor into a single line of code. groundcover is a revolution in observability. The team delivers on the promise of eBFP like never before,” says Avital Tamir, Lemonade’s DevOps Lead (NYSE: LMND). “Their cutting edge tech and attitude allows us to reinvent Lemonade’s monitoring solution, making it future-proof and setting the ground for massive scale.”
“groundcover is addressing a gap in the market with the powerful innovation of the APM sphere,” said Oren Zeev of Zeev Ventures. ”Propelled by a new technology, groundcover has positioned itself to be a market leader, pioneering a no trade-offs approach to cloud-native observability. I’m genuinely thrilled to be a part of this unique opportunity.”
Founded in 2021 by Shahar Azulay (previously ML Manager, Apple) and Yechezkel Rabonivich (previously Chief Architect, CyberMDX). The two served together in an elite cyber unit in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office where they dealt with frustration caused by APM issues. The company has raised $24.5M to date from VCs such as Zeev Ventures, Angular Ventures, Heavybit and Jibe Ventures.
