Groundcover Secures $100 M Series C to Build AI‑Era Observability Platform — the San Francisco‑based startup announced a $100 million Series C round led by One Peak, with participation from Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and existing backers. The funding pushes total capital raised to $160 million and is earmarked for scaling its bring‑your‑own‑cloud (BYOC), eBPF‑native observability platform for enterprise AI workloads.
The round and its backers
Groundcover’s Series C brings in $100 million, a vote of confidence from One Peak, a venture firm focused on AI infrastructure, and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, which has recently doubled down on cloud‑native startups. Existing investors Zeev Ventures, Angular Ventures, Heavybit and Jibe also participated, underscoring a consensus that the market for high‑fidelity telemetry is heating up.
What the technology does
At its core, groundcover offers a BYOC data plane that lets customers run the observability stack inside their own cloud tenancy—whether on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or on‑prem. An adaptive eBPF sensor, deployed in minutes without code changes, captures unsampled, high‑resolution traces, metrics and logs from infrastructure, applications and AI models. The data is then exposed through native OpenTelemetry (OTel) APIs, allowing existing monitoring tools and emerging AI agents to consume a complete, unfiltered view of production workloads.
Why the announcement matters now
Gartner predicts that by 2027, 70 % of enterprises will rely on AI automation for production operations, up from 30 % in 2023. The same study warns that legacy observability solutions, which rely on aggressive sampling and hard‑coded retention limits, will become a bottleneck for AI‑enabled teams. Groundcover’s architecture directly addresses that gap by eliminating sampling, providing unlimited cardinality, and keeping telemetry under the customer’s security perimeter.
How it changes the engineering‑to‑agent workflow
Groundcover introduced “Agent Mode,” an interface that surfaces anomalies, suggests remediation steps, and can trigger autonomous actions via AI agents. In practice, an engineer troubleshooting a model drift can hand off the incident to an LLM‑powered agent that queries the full‑fidelity telemetry, isolates the offending component, and initiates a rollback—all without manual data stitching. This collaboration model blurs the line between human and machine, promising faster mean‑time‑to‑resolution (MTTR) for AI‑centric services.
Competitive landscape
Traditional observability vendors such as Datadog, New Relic and Splunk have begun adding AI features, but their platforms still depend on centralized SaaS ingestion pipelines that impose sampling and storage caps. Open‑source projects like Prometheus and Grafana Loki excel at metric collection but lack the built‑in eBPF depth and BYOC data‑plane isolation that groundcover touts. By marrying eBPF’s kernel‑level visibility with BYOC’s security model, groundcover carves a niche that aligns with the emerging “AI‑first” stack championed by cloud giants like Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, Amazon SageMaker and Microsoft Azure Machine Learning.
Implications for enterprise teams, especially marketing
For marketing technology stacks that increasingly embed AI—think predictive audience segmentation in Salesforce Marketing Cloud or automated creative generation in Adobe Experience Platform—reliable telemetry is essential. Groundcover’s unsampled data enables real‑time monitoring of inference latency, model accuracy drift, and cost‑per‑inference, giving marketers the confidence to push AI‑driven campaigns at scale. Moreover, the BYOC model satisfies strict data‑privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA) that many ad‑tech firms must navigate, reducing legal exposure while preserving performance insights.
Roadmap and use of funds
Groundcover plans to allocate the Series C proceeds across three fronts: expanding its North American sales force, entering Europe and APAC markets, and accelerating product development—particularly AI‑agent orchestration, cross‑cloud federation, and deeper integrations with major cloud marketplaces. The company also aims to double its ARR in the next 12 months, a goal supported by its recent 3× YoY revenue growth and a customer base that now exceeds 250 paying organizations, ranging from early‑stage startups to Fortune 5 enterprises.
Market Landscape
The observability market, valued at $9.3 billion in 2023, is projected by IDC to reach $19 billion by 2028, driven largely by AI‑intensive workloads. As AI models proliferate, telemetry volumes are doubling every few months—a rate that outpaces the scaling capabilities of most SaaS‑based monitoring tools. Companies are therefore gravitating toward solutions that keep data in‑house, avoid sampling, and integrate natively with OpenTelemetry—a trend that aligns with groundcover’s BYOC‑eBPF proposition.
Simultaneously, the rise of AI agents for autonomous operations, highlighted in a recent Forrester Wave, signals a shift from “observability as a dashboard” to “observability as an execution engine.” Groundcover positions itself at the intersection of these trends, offering a platform that not only visualizes data but also powers autonomous remediation.
Top Insights
- Groundcover’s $100 M Series C validates investor belief that unsampled, BYOC telemetry is a prerequisite for AI‑driven production automation.
- By leveraging eBPF, the platform captures kernel‑level events without code changes, delivering a level of fidelity that traditional agents cannot match.
- The BYOC data plane satisfies enterprise privacy mandates while enabling unlimited storage, a differentiator against SaaS‑only competitors.
- “Agent Mode” bridges the gap between engineers and AI agents, reducing MTTR for AI‑centric incidents and opening new pathways for autonomous operations.
- Marketing teams can leverage groundcover’s real‑time model performance metrics to scale AI‑powered campaigns without compromising on compliance or latency.
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