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).
AMW Analysis
Chronosphere operates a cloud-native observability platform built for Kubernetes and microservices environments, aimed at helping enterprises manage large telemetry data volumes while controlling cost and improving mean time to repair. Founded in 2019 and based in New York, the company raised a total of $369.4M through a Series C round backed by investors including Greylock Partners, Lux Capital, General Atlantic, Addition, Founders Fund, and GV. Its core value proposition centers on a telemetry control plane that reduces observability data volume and costs by up to 60% by eliminating redundant "data tax" and noise.
Recent news flow shows Chronosphere expanding its product with AI-Guided Troubleshooting, using a Temporal Knowledge Graph to provide root-cause explanations within the observability market, positioned against competitors focused on basic outage detection. This product direction culminated in an acquisition: Palo Alto Networks finalized a $3.35 billion purchase of Chronosphere, integrating its observability technology into the Cortex AgentiX platform. The stated rationale for the deal centers on using Chronosphere's telemetry pipelines to reduce data volumes and support AI-driven automation, including a stated goal of enabling autonomous security operations centers.
AMW analysis, generated from 2 tracked news signals.
- 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.
Latest news about Chronosphere
- Palo Alto Networks has finalized its $3.35 billion acquisition of Chronosphere, integrating cloud-native observability into the Cortex AgentiX platform. The merger leverages telemetry pipelines to cut
- Chronosphere is redefining the $10.7B AI observability market with self-explaining AI, directly challenging Datadog's focus on basic outage detection. Their new AI-Guided Troubleshooting uses a Tempor
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Official website: https://chronosphere.io