groundcover, a start up with a mission to reinvent the cloud-native application monitoring domain with kernel technology eBPF (Extended Berkeley Packet Filter), raised $24.5 million in funding – $4.5 million in seed funding and $20 million in a Series A round. Zeev Ventures led the A series round with previous investors Angular Ventures, Heavybit and Jibe Ventures. The funds are targeted for product development.
Founded in 2021, groundcover uses eBPF to help teams monitor their K8s applications, 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 more than $50 billion, observability is one of the largest and fastest-growing markets in infrastructure software. Teams are allocating up to 10 percent of their IT spending to observability. Giant companies lead the APM sector, yet because of growing data volumes and intricate technology stacks, the cost has risen, and these solutions are harder to integrate and maintain.
eBPF was introduced in 2014 and allows programs to run in an isolated virtual machine inside the Linux kernel. In the last two years, eBPF has evolved to solve new use cases, becoming the next great promise in fields like network infrastructure, security and observability. groundcover uses eBPF to provide deep Kubernetes observability to trace any type of event – from network and infrastructure to services and applications running in the user space.
By using eBPF to collect observability data from the Linux kernel, groundcover requires no R&D efforts. 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 happening inside a Kubernetes cluster.
groundcover exposes the root cause of any crash instantly by monitoring 100 percent of the production stack covering every application, legacy code, side car or third-party component. 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,” said 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.”
For further information contact Mira Marcus, mira@groundcover.com
