Groundcover's $100M Round Signals BYOC Observability Gaining Ground Against Datadog

Groundcover raises $100M to scale BYOC observability alternative

Groundcover Inc. closed a $100 million Series C led by One Peak, with Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, Zeev Ventures, Angular Ventures, Heavybit, and Jibe participating. The round brings total funding to $160 million and values the company at approximately $500 million, according to CTech reporting. Over the past year, Groundcover tripled annual recurring revenue and doubled headcount globally.

The company positions itself as a bring-your-own-cloud, eBPF and OpenTelemetry-native observability platform. The product monitors applications and infrastructure inside customers' own cloud accounts without data egress or sampling trade-offs common in agent-based incumbents. Coverage explicitly frames the round as funding Groundcover's scale-out versus Datadog and Dynatrace, the entrenched players charging heavily on ingest and retention.

Why BYOC and eBPF matter for enterprise budgets

Observability costs at scale are dominated by data egress charges and vendor ingest pricing. Datadog and Dynatrace bill on metrics, traces, and logs flowing into their SaaS platforms, creating linearly increasing costs as Kubernetes clusters and microservices proliferate. Groundcover's BYOC model keeps telemetry data inside the buyer's cloud account, eliminating egress fees and shifting the cost structure toward compute and storage the buyer already controls.

eBPF instrumentation observes kernel-level events without modifying application code or injecting proprietary agents. OpenTelemetry standardizes telemetry collection across languages and runtimes. Together, these technologies let platform engineering teams avoid vendor lock-in on data models and agents while gaining full-fidelity observability. For enterprises running tens of thousands of containers, that architectural difference translates into measurably lower total cost of ownership.

The $100 million raise and $160 million total funding provides multi-year runway, making Groundcover a credible participant in observability RFPs alongside Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, and Elastic. Sourcing teams can now push for usage-based pricing with caps and strong SLAs, using incumbent benchmarks as reference while negotiating aggressive discounts from a well-funded but relatively early-stage vendor.

Cloudsmith adds policy templates and cooldown windows for artifact governance

Cloudsmith raised $23 million Series B led by TCV with Insight Partners participating. Simultaneously, the cloud-native artifact management platform announced expanded policy management and continuous risk detection capabilities. New features include policy templates for standardizing governance rules, cooldown policies that delay artifact promotion to production for additional validation, and expanded evaluation triggers to run security checks across more lifecycle events.

The company competes with JFrog Artifactory, Sonatype Nexus Repository, and GitHub Packages for artifact management, plus Sonatype Lifecycle, Snyk, and GitHub Advanced Security for supply-chain risk controls. The focus on granular policy and cooldown windows differentiates Cloudsmith from simpler allow-deny rules in existing repositories.

For enterprises facing SBOM requirements, provenance controls, or internal audit pressure on software supply chains, Cloudsmith's policy templates and cooldown mechanisms map directly into governance frameworks. Platform teams owning internal developer platforms can embed these rules into pipelines, turning artifact promotion gates into policy-driven controls that satisfy compliance without manual gating. The TCV and Insight backing creates a credible alternative to incumbents if buyers want centralized artifact governance without migrating CI/CD tooling.

Blacksmith raises $45M at $550M valuation for test automation scale

Blacksmith closed a $45 million Series B at a $550 million valuation, led by Peak XV Partners. The round funds scaling operations amid demand for faster software testing and validation tools. While product specifics are limited, the company emphasizes high-throughput test execution and cloud-based test infrastructure for development teams.

The funding signals enterprise appetite for test automation that keeps pace with CI/CD velocity. Buyers consolidating test infrastructure across teams can now evaluate Blacksmith alongside BrowserStack, Sauce Labs, and cloud-native testing services from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The $550 million valuation and Series B backing provide enough runway for multi-year commitments, making the vendor shortlist credible for platform engineering teams standardizing testing tooling.

What to watch

Groundcover's funding and ARR growth indicate BYOC observability is moving from niche positioning to mainstream consideration in enterprise RFPs. Expect Datadog and Dynatrace to respond with pricing pressure and BYOC-adjacent features. Buyers running Kubernetes at scale should benchmark data egress and ingest costs against BYOC alternatives before renewing incumbents.

Cloudsmith's policy and cooldown features create negotiation leverage in artifact management deals. If JFrog or Sonatype resist pricing concessions, buyers can credibly walk to a funded alternative with modern governance controls. Test the policy templates against your internal compliance frameworks before committing to multi-year repository contracts.

Blacksmith's valuation suggests test automation consolidation will accelerate. Platform teams should evaluate whether centralizing test execution on a single vendor delivers cost savings versus fragmented tooling across teams. Ask for usage-based pricing with scale discounts and SLAs on test execution latency.