Datadog acquires AI-powered observability startup Metaplane

Summary

Cloud monitoring and security platform Datadog on Wednesday said it has acquired Metaplane, an AI-powered data observability startup. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. 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 its 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. They originally launched the company as a “customer success” product that analyzed firms’ data to prevent churn, but 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 lineages in a data warehouse — the systems used for reporting and data analysis — and notifies 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 or otherwise, and Metaplane’s system will learn over time. Metaplane had until now raised $22.2 million in total 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...