Observability startup groundcover said it has raised $100 million in a Series C round led by One Peak, bringing its total funding to $160 million. The four-year-old company, which spells its name in lowercase, said it now has more than 250 paying customers and tripled its annual recurring revenue over the past year.
The company is trying to break into a market dominated by Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Splunk and Grafana. It argues that AI has changed the assumptions those platforms were built on. According to groundcover, AI systems generate far more telemetry and increasingly participate in software operations, making traditional observability architectures less suitable.
Groundcover uses a bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) model. Customers keep telemetry storage and processing inside their own AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud environments, while groundcover provides a managed control plane. A fully self-hosted option is also available.
Instead of charging by data volume, the company prices by monitored hosts. It says this removes the incentive for customers to sample or discard telemetry to control costs, giving them complete operational data for AI-assisted troubleshooting.
The company also relies on eBPF, a Linux kernel technology that observes network traffic and application behavior without requiring developers to manually instrument code. It claims that combining eBPF-based collection, customer-controlled storage and unified pricing distinguishes it from competitors.
Groundcover's Agent Mode product lets engineers investigate incidents using natural language across logs, metrics, traces and Kubernetes events. The company says humans remain in the loop for now, but it expects AI agents to gradually take on more operational tasks, with observability feeding production context back to coding agents.
The funding reflects growing interest in AI observability, but the company faces a tough market. Datadog alone generated more than $3 billion in annual revenue in 2025, and Gartner tracks more than 100 observability products. Groundcover's revenue and customer figures are company-reported, and it has not published independent studies of customer migration or cost savings. Its published customer case studies are vendor-authored.
Whether the company can displace incumbents remains to be seen, but the Series C shows some investors are betting that AI will reshape how observability is built and priced.