OllyGarden raises $4M seed to clean up telemetry data
Berlin's OllyGarden raised a $4M seed to clean telemetry before it reaches the observability bill - with rivals Datadog and Grafana Labs both investing, a rare joint bet on the layer beneath them.
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Founded 2025 · Berlin, Germany
OllyGarden, the Berlin startup built by OpenTelemetry contributors, has raised a $4M seed round backed by Next Frontier Capital, Grand Ventures and ACTAI Ventures, with strategic investments from Datadog, Grafana Labs and Dash0, to fix the quality of telemetry data at the source.
Engineering teams everywhere are paying more to observe their software while trusting the data less – and the most interesting part of this round is that the companies selling that observability just paid to clean it up. Below, I lay out the round, the Berlin team behind it, and why rivals who fight for every monitoring dollar ended up on the same cap table.
A seed round where rivals share the cap table
OllyGarden announced a $4M seed round on 9 October 2026. Next Frontier Capital, Grand Ventures and ACTAI Ventures backed the round – no single lead was named – while existing investor Dig Ventures increased its stake. The names that make the round unusual came alongside: Datadog, Grafana Labs and Dash0, three companies that compete in observability, all made strategic investments.
The money goes to building out the company’s telemetry-quality platform, announced together with a new capability called Minimum Viable Instrumentation. “Telemetry quality is a foundational enterprise problem that everyone has and nobody owns,” said Rytis Vitkauskas, partner at Dig Ventures, in the announcement – which is about as close to a thesis statement as seed investing gets.
OpenTelemetry’s gardeners work from Berlin
OllyGarden launched in 2025 in Berlin, founded by Juraci Paixão Kröhling, a member of the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee, and Yuri Oliveira Sa. The team is built from OpenTelemetry contributors – the people who maintain the open standard much of the industry now uses to ship telemetry in the first place.
The product treats telemetry like the supply chain it is. Insights scores the quality of what services emit and flags the problems; Rose, the company’s AI OpenTelemetry engineer, reviews code and fixes instrumentation at the source; the new Minimum Viable Instrumentation capability spots what is missing and recommends a baseline. The company says it has helped customers in retail, financial services and enterprise software cut log volumes by up to 85% over the past year. “More instrumentation is not better instrumentation,” as Kröhling put it in the announcement.
An $11.9bn market that bills for its own noise
The segment OllyGarden sells into has a measured size: observability tools and platforms are an $11.91bn market in 2026, projected to reach $22.99bn by 2031, a 14.1% CAGR (MarketsandMarkets, July 2026). A large share of that spend scales with data volume – and the company’s whole pitch is that part of the volume is waste, which AI-generated code is now multiplying.
For scale against our own records: Klarent raised a €7.13M seed the same week, also in developer tooling, to verify the code AI writes. A $4M Berlin seed sits at the disciplined end of the range – enough to turn an open-source reputation into a commercial product without betting the company on a growth story it does not need yet.
Why Datadog and Grafana paid for the same plumbing
So what does it signal when competitors invest together? The reality is that bad telemetry hurts every observability vendor at once: noisy data makes the bills look indefensible and the dashboards less useful, whichever logo is on the contract. The good news is that the fix – a neutral quality layer built on the open standard itself – is exactly the kind of company Europe produces well, because the standard’s governance already runs through engineers based here – this round’s founder among them.
What we are seeing is US money following European open-source credibility: a Montana fund, a Michigan fund and a corporate trio most founders would struggle to get into one room, all wiring a seed cheque to Berlin. Two things are worth watching from here: whether the strategic investors stay neutral as OllyGarden scores data headed for their own platforms, and whether more OpenTelemetry maintainers follow the path from governance seat to term sheet. Our fundraising data will keep the tally.
Europe already writes the standards the world’s telemetry runs on. Owning the quality layer on top of them is the obvious next move – let’s build it!
