Dash0 Secures $9.5 Million to Further Develop Observability Tools

Mirko Novakovic

Dash0, pronounced Dash-zero, has closed a seed round of $9.5 million led by Accel, with participation from London-based Dig Ventures and angel investors including Snyk founder Guy Podjarny and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch. Dig is the investment firm of MulesSoft founder Ross Mason.

The New York startup aims to make so-called observability of cloud networks cheaper and better. The company has built its technology on OpenTelemetry — an open-source platform for cloud-native software analysis — and aims to bring transparency and fair pricing to a segment that accounts for up to 20% of cloud costs.

Co-founder and CEO Mirko Novakovic established Dash0 as a rival to Datadog, after the Swizz native sold his previous venture Instana to IBM for a reported $500 million in 2020.

“For too long, developers have had no control over observability costs and have been unable to tap the potential offered by OpenTelemetry’s simple, vendor-neutral standards,” Novakovic said.

“If you’re running a cloud-native application, there are 100s of pieces in the complex puzzle that is your full stack. But if these puzzle pieces aren’t 100% optimized & in-sync, you’re missing out on $$ saved,” Novakovic says on his LinkedIn page.

In an interview to TechCrunch, Novakovic said his company’s technology has a feature called Semantic conventions that allows a user, “at any given time, [to] see exactly which service or which developer or which application creates how much cost on the observability side.”

Part of Dash0’s agenda is to enhance OpenTelemetry, which “is not that easy to use at the moment,” when compared with Datadog’s proprietary technology, Novakovic said. The company also plans to build integrations with Slack, email and other tools. Dash0 initially targets companies with up to 5,000 employees.

“Making observability easy is actually as difficult as it is game-changing. With its next-generation product, Dash0 team are redefining this critical infrastructure category and, for the first time, opening it up to all developers,” said Dig Ventures founder Mason.