Cloud monitoring and security platform Datadog on Wednesday announced that it has acquired Metaplane, an AI-powered data observability startup, for an undisclosed amount.
In a press release, Datadog said that the deal “accelerates” its expansion into data observability, building on the launch of related products. Metaplane will continue supporting existing and new customers through a rebranded “Metaplane by Datadog” offering.
“Observability is no longer just for developers and IT teams; it’s now an essential part of data teams’ day-to-day responsibilities as they manage increasingly complex and business-critical workflows,” Datadog VP Michael Whetten said in a statement. “This complexity will become even more pronounced as more businesses deploy AI applications. By unifying observability across applications and data, Datadog will help organizations build reliable AI systems.”
MIT graduate Kevin Hu, former HubSpot engineer Peter Casinelli, and ex-Appcues developer Guru Mahendran founded Metaplane in 2020. The three co-founders originally launched the company as a “customer success” product that analyzed firms’ data to prevent churn. After going through Y Combinator — and with the pandemic hitting — Metaplane pivoted but continued to build data analytics-focused tools.
Metaplane monitors data using anomaly detection AI models trained primarily on historical metadata. It attempts to establish lineage from data in a data warehouse — the systems used for reporting and data analysis — and notify stakeholders of issues via their tool of choice (e.g. Slack, PagerDuty, and so on). From those tools, users can mark any alert as an expected change, and Metaplane’s system will learn over time.
Prior to its exit, Metaplane managed to raise $22.2 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, Flybridge Capital Partners, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, and HubSpot CTO Dharmesh Shah. As of January 2023, the Boston-based startup had around 10 employees.
“Our mission at Metaplane is to help companies ensure trust in the data that powers their business,” Hu said in a statement. “Joining forces with Datadog enables us to bring data observability to tens of thousands more companies, while bringing data teams and software teams closer together.”
Metaplane is Datadog’s second acquisition this year. In January, the company acquired Quickwit, an open source, cloud-native search engine for logs.
Growing its data observability portfolio makes sense for Datadog, which recently reported earnings that topped estimates but full-year 2025 revenue guidance that came in well below expectations. Observability is a large and healthy market — one that could become a significant source of business for Datadog down the line.
According to Grand View Research, the market for data observability tools was worth $2.14 billion in 2023 and could climb at a 12.2% compound annual growth rate between 2024 and 2030. Of course, there’s stiff competition. Big players include Monte Carlo, Cribl, Manta, Observe, Better Stack, Coralogix, and Unravel Data. Datadog’s challenge will be sufficiently differentiating its data observability products, which the company is attempting to do both through acquisitions like Metaplane as well as in-house projects such as jobs and streams monitoring.
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