The market struggles with traditional application monitoring tools due to their high cost, complexity, and inefficiency. These tools often lack scalability, detailed insights, and seamless observability for modern cloud-native environments. groundcover addresses these challenges using eBPF technology to provide lightweight, cost-effective, full-stack observability with zero-code instrumentation, ensuring efficient monitoring at scale without compromising performance or data privacy.
Today, the eBPF-driven observability platform for modern architectures raised $35 million in Series B funding led by Zeev Ventures, with participation from Heavybit, Jibe Ventures, and Angular Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding to $60M, which will fund aggressive expansion in the USA, where it has successfully replaced legacy observability solutions such as Datadog, New Relic, Grafana Cloud, and others.
How groundcover breaks free from traditional APM limitations
groundcover was founded in 2021 in Tel Aviv, Israel, by Shahar Azulay and Yechezkel Rabinovich. Both founders previously worked in elite cyber units in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, where they experienced frustrations with traditional application performance monitoring (APM) tools.
Azulay told us exclusively, “groundcover was created to tackle real issues we experienced as engineers using observability solutions ourselves. Traditional observability tools are prohibitively expensive, leading teams to limit their monitoring, leaving gaps and costly blind spots. On top of that, these solutions lack the granularity needed to find errors quickly, which leads to longer resolution times and wasted developer hours and resources.
Existing solutions also require developers to build their own correlation logic, adding to the heavy maintenance burden. groundcover is the the only solution on the market built from the ground up with eBPF and a BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) approach, providing a more efficient, cost-effective, and integrated observability solution. “
The founders sought to overcome the shortcomings of current solutions, such as high costs, complexity, and inadequate scalability, by leveraging eBPF technology to develop a contemporary, efficient, and cost-effective observability platform explicitly designed for cloud-native environments.
Today, groundcover has 60 employees, has grown its ARR by over 500% since last year, and is investing heavily in major partnerships, including AWS, GCP, and others. Its modern observability platform is used by hundreds of enterprises, from fast-growing technology companies to Fortune 100 firms.
Behind groundcover: eBPF powers its efficient monitoring solution
groundcover utilises eBPF (Extended Berkeley Packet Filter) to gather telemetry data directly from the Linux kernel, removing the requirement for manual code instrumentation or sidecar containers. In contrast to traditional APM tools that depend on SDKs or service meshes, eBPF programs attach to kernel hooks, capturing real-time network traffic, system calls, and application interactions.
This method resolves the “black box” problem in distributed systems, offering comprehensive insights into containerised workloads without imposing CPU or memory overhead. Additionally, the eBPF architecture facilitates cross-stack correlation, automatically connecting infrastructure metrics (such as node CPU usage) with application-layer traces and logs. For instance, an increase in database query latency can be traced back to specific Kubernetes pod rescheduling events, cutting mean time to resolution (MTTR) by 40–60% in documented instances.
“Our platform provides significantly better coverage and value compared to legacy application monitoring solutions that have existed for over a decade,” says Shahar Azulay, CEO and Co-Founder of groundcover. “We are the only solution designed with eBPF at the forefront from the beginning, and we are now leading the ‘bring your own cloud’ approach to observability, allowing organisations to keep their data on-premises while enjoying all the advantages of the SaaS model.”
The world’s first “Bring Your Own Cloud” (BYOC) observability solution
groundcover introduces the first “Bring Your Own Cloud” (BYOC) observability solution, revolutionising the architecture of contemporary observability platforms. This allows clients to retain their observability data on-premises while benefiting from full management by groundcover.
“groundcover is fundamentally transforming the observability landscape. With its ebpf-based platform and ‘Bring Your Own Cloud’ model, it’s establishing a new benchmark for depth of observability, cost efficiency, and security,” remarked Oren Zev, Founder of Zeev Ventures. “As the industry navigates a transition toward richer experiences like AI in observability data, groundcover’s modern architecture is set to surpass outdated solutions and lead the market.” Many customers have successfully transitioned from Datadog to the groundcover platform. The new AI-powered migration service offered by groundcover alleviates the challenges of vendor lock-in and legacy complications, facilitating swift migration of monitors, dashboards, and data from Datadog to groundcover.
“With Datadog, we were incurring costs for both infrastructure and observability, effectively doubling our expenses,” stated Alex Nauda, CTO of Nobl9. “With groundcover, we manage it ourselves and set our own retention policies – eliminating costly SaaS markups, surprise overages, and the forced deletion of data due to cost constraints.”
Future plans? Pioneering the next wave of observability
groundcover’s eBPF/BYOC architecture marks a significant transformation, allowing businesses to efficiently monitor cloud-native applications at scale without compromising cost efficiency or security. As businesses turn away from excessive SaaS pricing structures, the company’s focus on infrastructure may trigger a broader commoditisation within the industry, similar to the influence Kubernetes had on orchestration tools ten years ago.
Azulay concluded: “groundcover is transforming observability by making it more accessible and efficient. As a leader in BYOC and eBPF-based cloud-native architecture, that fits both cloud and on-prem environments, we’re driving the commoditization of observability technologies to eliminate the complexity and high costs traditionally associated with the space.
Over the next 3–5 years, we’ll continue to challenge outdated observability solutions that lock users into rigid, expensive plans that eventually limit the value they get out of them. Additionally, due to our unique BYOC architecture, we allow customers to store much more observability data in the secured four walls of their cloud premises. This positions groundcover to be best-in-class for advanced AI applications on top of observability – which we will be pursuing for the next few years.”
