Today, we’re thrilled to celebrate Observe’s next chapter as the company joins Snowflake. This milestone is a powerful validation of a bold technical bet and a founding team relentlessly focused on delivering customer value above all else.
When we first partnered with Jeremy Burton and the Observe team, our belief was that the next generation of cloud companies would need observability built not around isolated logs, metrics, or traces, but around the relationships between data. As longtime investors and operators in the dev tools and infrastructure realms, we understood the opportunity for a truly modern architecture that unified all machine data, separated storage from compute, and enabled scalable, cost-efficient analysis rather than incremental patches on yesterday’s systems. Observe also decided to take a bet on Snowflake for its underlying storage needs as opposed to building a custom storage system like every other observability player.
Observe delivered exactly that and now has a fantastic opportunity to deepen the powerful “better together” story with Snowflake. Along the way, we learned a few key lessons:
The value: From the beginning, the Observe team resisted the gravitational pull of legacy observability stacks. Instead, they set out to build what the market truly needed: a Data Observability Cloud that ingests all of a company’s operational data into a single lake, models it into a rich context graph, and surfaces the right context at the right time. Observe didn’t just modernize observability, it redefined it.
Disciplined Product Investment, Then High-Velocity GTM: A central lesson from Observe’s journey is the importance of sequencing. In the early years, the team focused almost entirely on building product, not sales or marketing. Investing in a system capable of meeting the complexity, scale, and performance demands of the largest cloud-native enterprises was a challenge, but that discipline paid off. Once Observe achieved clear product-market fit, the company shifted gears, scaling GTM only when the product was truly ready. This pacing enabled building an enterprise-ready product and created a strong foundation for rapid expansion. In a market where many startups sprint too early, Observe’s patience became its advantage.
Choosing the Right Platform Bet and Staying Laser-Focused on Customer Value: Another hallmark of Observe’s strategy was its willingness to bet on a single platform, Snowflake, rather than spreading efforts thin across multiple architectures. This was a partnership grounded in customer value. By aligning deeply with Snowflake’s ecosystem, Observe benefited from a powerful, elastic compute engine, a global customer footprint, and a rapidly expanding ecosystem of data products. Not every company should take a single-platform approach, but when you do, it must be anchored in customer benefit. Observe understood that intuitively.
Choosing whether to grow as an independent company or become part of a larger platform is one of the hardest decisions founders and investors face. At its core, the question is which path will best advance the mission and amplify value for customers. For Observe, the calculus centered on reach, scale, and impact. Snowflake provides a distribution engine, customer access, and global scale that would take years for any independent company to build. The opportunity to embed Observe’s differentiated technology into a broader cloud ecosystem became the natural next step.
We could not be more excited for the Observe team on this outstanding achievement. Congratulations to Jeremy and the entire team at Observe!
We are grateful to have been partners on this journey, and we believe this moment marks both a remarkable accomplishment and an inspiring new beginning for the company. As early investors in Snowflake, this moment feels like it brings the story full circle, so we are doubly excited to see Observe join Snowflake.