Dash0 Launch Week starting November 4th. Join us.

  • 7 min read

Dash0 announces $9.5M seed financing, led by Accel, to simplify observability for developers everywhere

Solingen, Monday 4th November 2024 - Dash0, the first OpenTelemetry-native observability tool, has raised $9.5M in seed financing to bring simple, standardized observability to modern cloud-based businesses. The investment was led by Accel, with participation from Dig Ventures and angel investors including Guy Podjarny (co-founder, Snyk) and Guillermo Rauch (CEO, Vercel). The funding will be used to accelerate product development and scale Dash0’s sales and marketing teams.

  • Dash0 is the first observability tool built from the ground-up for OpenTelemetry, standardizing performance data to enable deeper insights
  • Funding coincides with Dash0’s official launch, following a successful beta with customers including catchHR, ChargeTrip and Porsche Digital
  • Founder and CEO Mirko Novakovic previously founded Accel-backed observability company Instana (acquired by IBM, 2020)

Observability - the ability to track the telemetry data that applications produce, such as metrics, logs, and traces - is one of the most powerful tools a developer can have at their disposal, and represents a $50B market opportunity. Analyzing telemetry data helps businesses to improve performance, reliability and user experience, and the launch of OpenTelemetry in 2019 made this even easier by providing universal open-source standards for data measurement. Despite this, OpenTelemetry’s potential is mostly untapped, with legacy observability tools favoring outdated, proprietary data collection methods that cannot be understood by other tools. The result is a poor user experience, data that can’t be contextualized, and high, unpredictable costs based on inconsistent standards.

Co-Founded by Mirko Novakovic, who also founded Accel-backed observability platform Instana (acquired by IBM in 2020), Dash0 is the first observability tool that is OpenTelemetry-native. This ensures it simplifies observability for developers everywhere, helping them gain deeper insights to improve system performance. After seeing the opportunity to accelerate the adoption of OpenTelemetry in the software market, Mirko and his co-founders Ben Blackmore, Miel Donkers, Marcel Birkner, and Michele Mancioppi built Dash0 from the ground up on top of these standards to empower developers with an observability framework that is easier to install, integrate, and use than legacy alternatives. Users have access to an intuitive UI, thanks to fully-customizable dashboards, while the platform also fully-supports PromQL and Perses, giving developers complete flexibility to query and visualize their observability data in real time. Integrations with Slack, email, and custom webhooks support easy, proactive monitoring and alerting.

Dash0’s OpenTelemetry-native approach means that it is the only observability tool that does not generate proprietary data for its customers, instead providing visibility of vendor-agnostic performance data that is standardized and fully contextualized. This prevents observability costs from spiraling, instead allowing transparent, real-time pricing based on standardized units of observability data generated by Dash0 users. Customers pay Dash0 based on the count of data they send, meaning they know exactly when and how charges are incurred. The Dash0 platform has also been built to prioritize trust and security, and is already SOC 2 Type 2 certified - one of the most rigorous information security standards - and GDPR-compliant, meaning that users’ telemetry data remains completely private.

Since its inception in 2023, Dash0 has grown its team to more than 20 people in a fully remote setup. Today’s funding coincides with Dash0’s move to general availability, following a successful beta launch in September with early users including catchHR, ChargeTrip and Porsche Digital.

  • Mirko Novakovic, Founder and CEO of Dash0, said: “OpenTelemetry is the future of observability. As the first OpenTelemetry-native tool, Dash0 is the next step for developers everywhere who want complete visibility over their entire stack. 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. We’re excited to announce this seed funding to make observability easy for every developer and to help them access the data they need to improve.”

  • Harry Nelis, Partner at Accel, said: “Dash0 is revolutionizing observability and taking advantage of a major opportunity in the market at the same time. By building the first OpenTelemetry-native observability tool, the company is committed to developing truly innovative software that can challenge legacy vendors by simplifying this crucial process for businesses everywhere. Accel partnered with Mirko on his journey with Instana and we’re delighted to be working with him again as he builds Dash0.”

  • Ross Mason, Founder of DIG Ventures, said: ”Making observability easy is actually as difficult as it is game changing. With its next generation product, Dash0 team are re-defining this critical infrastructure category and for the first time opening it up to all developers. Dig Ventures is run by, and for, brilliant technical founders like Mirko and his team, we are thrilled to support Dash0 from its inception.”

Developers can sign up for Dash0 at https://www.dash0.com/.

About Dash0

Dash0 is the world’s first OpenTelemetry-native observability tool, making observability simple for developers everywhere. Built from the ground up on OpenTelemetry’s standards, Dash0 helps developers gain deep insights into their applications and infrastructure through one easy-to-install, user-friendly platform while providing control of their observability costs at the same time. For more information, visit dash0.com.

About Accel

Accel is a global venture capital firm that is the first partner to exceptional teams everywhere, from inception through all phases of private company growth. 1Password, Atlassian, Bumble, Celonis, CrowdStrike, Cyera, Freshworks, Miro, Netskope, Oasis, Qualtrics, Scale, Segment, Slack, Snyk, Spotify, Supercell, Tenable, and UiPath are among the companies Accel has backed over the past 40+ years. We help ambitious entrepreneurs build iconic global businesses. For more information,visit accel.com or twitter.com/accel.

About Dig Ventures

Dig Ventures was started by Ross Mason, founder of Mulesoft, to support pre-seed and seed stage enterprise infrastructure and SaaS companies in Europe. We are a $100M fund and an all-operator partnership, working hand in hand to help entrepreneurs build, launch and scale consequential software companies.


Press contact:

Outcast: accel@thisisoutcast.com