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Chronosphere

Category: AI Developer Tools

A cloud-native observability platform purpose-built for Kubernetes and microservices that enables enterprises to manage massive telemetry data volumes with high performance and cost-efficiency. Chronosphere was founded in 2019. The company is led by Martin Mao. Based in New York, USA. Team size: 300-500. Total funding raised: $369.4M. Latest round: Series C. Key investors include ["Greylock Partners","Lux Capital","General Atlantic","Addition","Founders Fund","GV (Google Ventures)"].

Founded
2019
Headquarters
New York, USA
Team size
300-500
Total funding
$369.4M

Value proposition

Reduces observability data volume and costs by up to 60% while improving mean time to repair (MTTR) by providing a unique telemetry control plane that eliminates 'data tax' and noise.

Products and solutions

["Chronosphere Observability Platform (Metrics & Tracing)","Chronosphere Telemetry Pipeline (powered by Calyptia acquisition)","Telemetry Control Plane","Query Builder & Advanced Analytics","M3 (Open-source high-scale metrics engine)"]

Unique value

The only observability platform featuring a dedicated 'Control Plane' that allows teams to analyze, transform, and aggregate data in real-time before it is stored or indexed.

Target customer

Large-scale digital-native enterprises, SRE and DevOps teams, and organizations managing complex, high-cardinality microservices architectures (e.g., DoorDash, Snap, Robinhood).

Industries served

["Technology & SaaS","Financial Services & Fintech","E-commerce & Retail","Healthcare","Gaming & Media"]

Technology advantage

Built on the M3 open-source engine (originally created at Uber) to handle massive scale that legacy tools struggle with; provides a 'Live Traffic' view to optimize data ingestion and prevent cost overruns.

How they differentiate

Features a unique Telemetry Control Plane that allows teams to analyze, transform, and drop data before ingestion to reduce 'data tax' and costs by up to 60%.

Main competitors

["Datadog","Grafana Labs","New Relic","Splunk"]

Key partnerships

["Google Cloud (Strategic GTM partner)","Amazon Web Services (AWS ISV Accelerate Program)","CrowdStrike (Security and observability integration)","Snowflake","PagerDuty"]

Notable customers

["Snap","DoorDash","Robinhood","Zillow","Visa","Abnormal Security"]

Major milestones

["Founded in 2019 by creators of the M3 open-source metrics engine at Uber","Achieved Unicorn status with a $1.1B valuation in October 2021","Acquired Calyptia (creators of Fluent Bit) in January 2024 to expand telemetry pipeline capabilities","Acquired by Palo Alto Networks in May 2024 for $3.35 billion to anchor their observability business unit"]

Growth metrics

Reached $160M+ in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) with over 3x year-over-year growth prior to acquisition.

Market positioning

Premium observability leader for high-scale, digital-native enterprises and Kubernetes environments.

Geographic focus

North America and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa)

Patents and IP

Holds proprietary IP and patents related to distributed time-series data storage, telemetry data aggregation, and efficient query processing in cloud-native environments.

About Martin Mao

Martin Mao is the Co-founder and former CEO of Chronosphere, currently serving as SVP and GM of Observability at Palo Alto Networks following the company's acquisition. Prior to founding Chronosphere in 2019, he was an Engineering Manager at Uber, where he led the development of M3, a massive-scale open-source metrics platform. His earlier career includes significant roles as a Technical Lead at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on the EC2 team, and engineering positions at Microsoft and Google.

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