Observe, an app monitoring tool that uses data from myriad sources like logs, metrics, traces, and events, raises $35M Series A led by Sutter Hill Ventures
Context & Ripple Effects
Observe's 2020 Series A looks modest next to what followed: Sutter Hill Ventures led this round and then stayed on through a $115M Series B with Snowflake participating at a reported $400M-$500M valuation, and again for a $156M Series C in 2025. The thesis being funded — collapsing logs, metrics, traces, and events into one queryable store — is the same one Snowflake's own investors are betting on.
The timing also sits inside a busy October 2020 funding window for the telemetry stack: days later, Cribl raised a $35M Series B for routing infrastructure data to third-party monitoring tools, an adjacent layer to Observe's storage-and-analysis play. Note the name collision in the corpus — Observable, a separate data-visualization startup, raised its own rounds around the same dates.
First-order effects
- Observe gains $35M from Sutter Hill Ventures to build out its unified app-monitoring platform, while the firm extends the Snowflake-linked thesis that made its pre-IPO stake worth billions.
Second-order effects
- Cribl's contemporaneous raise signals a splitting of the stack: routing layers like Cribl decide where telemetry goes, and platforms like Observe compete to be the destination — pricing pressure lands on legacy per-GB log tools caught between them.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — the same lead investor compounding across rounds while a warehouse vendor joins at Series B — observability consolidates around data-warehouse economics, where telemetry becomes just another dataset queried centrally rather than siloed per tool.
The trend: Observability is consolidating from fragmented per-signal tools into unified telemetry platforms, with Sutter Hill Ventures and Snowflake-linked capital underwriting the shift round after round.