Shift5 is an operational intelligence and onboard observability company that taps the raw data already flowing across the internal networks of planes, trains, tanks, and ships. Founded by former U.S. Army cyber officers, it plugs into serial-bus and RF traffic on military and commercial fleets to deliver real-time cyber threat detection, predictive maintenance, and compliance insight at the edge. Backed by $185M+ in venture funding, Shift5 serves the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, SOCOM, and several of the largest U.S. passenger rail systems.
XOPS (legal name XperiencOps, Inc.) is a Menlo Park-based autonomous IT company that emerged from stealth in August 2025 with $40M co-led by Activant Capital and FPV Ventures. Billed as the first 'Active System of Intelligence,' its platform builds a living knowledge graph of an enterprise's fragmented IT estate and deploys a legion of goal-oriented software robots that coordinate existing systems - ServiceNow, Workday, Okta, Intune - to drive desired states across employee, device, and software lifecycles. The pitch: declare the outcome you want, and XOPS continuously converges your systems toward it, no tickets, no human middleware.
Axion Ray (operating as Axion) builds an AI 'observability command center' that helps the world's largest manufacturers catch product quality and safety problems months before they turn into recalls. Founded in 2021 by former McKinsey AI strategist Daniel First, the company fuses fragmented, unstructured field data - service tickets, dealership notes, call-center transcripts, sensor telemetry - into early-warning intelligence for engineering teams. Backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, RTX Ventures, Amplo and Inspired Capital with $25M raised, Axion works with manufacturers across aerospace, automotive, medtech and consumer goods.
BMC Software is a Houston-founded enterprise software company that builds the IT operations, service management, and mainframe automation tools that keep large organizations running. Founded in 1980 by three former Shell engineers, BMC has spent four decades turning the unglamorous work of keeping systems alive - monitoring, scheduling, patching, recovering - into automated, increasingly AI-driven products. Its flagship lines include Control-M (workload automation), the BMC AMI mainframe suite, and BMC Helix (service and operations management). Owned by KKR since 2018, BMC split into two focused companies, BMC and BMC Helix, in early 2025.
New Relic is a San Francisco-based, AI-powered observability platform that gives engineering teams a single place to see everything running in their software - from application code and infrastructure to logs, user experience, and AI models. Founded in 2008 by Lew Cirne, it helped popularize application performance monitoring (APM) and later coined much of the modern 'observability' category. After going public in 2014 and being taken private in a $6.5 billion deal in 2023, New Relic now serves thousands of companies with usage-based, consumption pricing and a strong bet on AI and agentic observability.
Karthik Rau is the CEO of Contentful, the Berlin-based composable content platform. A Stanford-trained industrial engineer, he founded the cloud-monitoring company SignalFx (acquired by Splunk for $1.05B in 2019) and earlier helped lead VMware through its 2007 IPO. He took the helm at Contentful in April 2024 to push it from headless CMS into an AI-era content platform.
Robert Weitershausen is Chief of Staff to the CEO at New Relic, the observability company. A retired U.S. Air Force aviator with roughly 24 years in uniform, he now translates strategy into execution at the top of a 2,000+ person software company - and writes about how leaders should think about disciplined AI adoption with humans in the loop.
BigPanda is an AIOps platform that uses machine learning to correlate noisy IT alerts from hundreds of monitoring tools into actionable incidents, helping enterprise operations teams detect, triage and resolve outages faster. Founded in 2012 and based in Mountain View / Redwood City, it serves large enterprises including Intel, PayPal, Workday and Gap.
Cribl is a vendor-agnostic data engine for IT and security teams that routes, shapes, reduces, and enriches observability and security telemetry between any source and any destination - letting enterprises escape vendor lock-in and tame runaway data costs.
Imply is a San Francisco-based data analytics company that built its platform on Apache Druid - the open-source real-time analytics database that its co-founders helped create. The company offers Imply Polaris, a fully managed cloud database-as-a-service for real-time analytics, and Imply Lumi, billed as the industry's first Observability Warehouse. With $215M in total funding and unicorn status at a $1.1B valuation, Imply serves 100+ enterprise customers including Atlassian, Reddit, and Cisco ThousandEyes, enabling sub-second query performance across terabytes to petabytes of streaming and historical data.
Observe is an AI-powered observability platform that unifies logs, metrics, and traces into a single streaming data lake built on Snowflake. The company helps enterprises troubleshoot distributed applications 3x faster at one-third the cost of traditional monitoring tools. Founded in 2017 by veterans from Splunk, Wavefront, and Snowflake, Observe was acquired by Snowflake in January 2026 for approximately $1 billion after raising over $665 million in funding.
Anuraag Gutgutia is co-founder of TrueFoundry, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI platform that lets companies build, deploy, and govern generative and agentic AI inside their own cloud infrastructure. A quantitative analyst turned repeat entrepreneur, he spent seven years at WorldQuant rising to VP of Portfolio Management and the CEO's office before co-founding the talent platform EntHire (acquired by InfoEdge/BigShyft) and then TrueFoundry in 2021 alongside two IIT Kharagpur batchmates. TrueFoundry has raised $21.3M in total funding - including a $19M Series A led by Intel Capital in February 2025 - and serves Fortune 1000 companies seeking to run AI workloads without infrastructure complexity or data-sovereignty tradeoffs.
Clint Sharp is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cribl, a data infrastructure company valued at $3.5 billion that helps Fortune 500 enterprises route, filter, and control their telemetry data at scale. Before building Cribl, he spent five years as Senior Director of Product Management at Splunk, where he and his co-founders identified the problem that would become Cribl's founding mission: data volumes were exploding, budgets were not, and enterprises needed a vendor-agnostic way to manage what goes where. Under Sharp's leadership, Cribl grew from a 2017 idea to more than $200M in ARR, serving 43 Fortune 100 companies - all while he also briefly served as interim Chief Revenue Officer during a pivotal growth moment.
Jason Lopatecki is the co-founder and CEO of Arize AI, a leading AI observability and evaluation platform that has raised $131M including a $70M Series C in 2025. A serial entrepreneur and UC Berkeley EECS graduate, he previously co-founded TubeMogul and scaled it from a garage startup to a NASDAQ-listed public company before Adobe acquired it in 2016. At Arize, he is building the infrastructure layer that helps engineering teams test, evaluate, and troubleshoot AI models and LLM-powered agents in production - a market that has exploded with the rise of generative AI.
Jonathan Trevor is a Co-Founder of Observe, Inc., an AI-powered observability platform built on a streaming data lake that unifies logs, metrics, and traces to help engineering teams detect, investigate, and resolve incidents faster. He came to Observe from Wavefront (now VMware Tanzu Observability), where he served as Frontend Lead, and before that led frontend engineering at Shocase. Trevor holds a PhD in Computer Science from Lancaster University. Observe - co-founded with Jacob Leverich (ex-Splunk), Jon Watte (ex-Roblox), and Philip Unterbrunner (ex-Snowflake) and incubated by Sutter Hill Ventures - raised $156M in Series C funding in July 2025 before Snowflake announced its intent to acquire the company for approximately $1 billion in January 2026, its largest acquisition to date.
Milin Desai is the CEO of Sentry, the developer-first error monitoring and application performance platform trusted by over 4 million developers and 100,000+ organizations. A computer engineer by training with a master's from USC, Desai spent nearly a decade at VMware scaling the NSX network virtualization product line into a billion-dollar business before joining Sentry in January 2020. Under his leadership, Sentry raised a $90 million Series E in 2022 (total funding $219.75M), achieved unicorn status at a $3B+ valuation, surpassed $100M ARR, and grew to process 790+ billion events per month - all while staying true to its open-source, developer-first ethos and charging one-third of what competitors ask.
Resolve AI builds an agentic AI Production Engineer that handles alerts, investigates incidents, and performs root cause analysis on production systems - reducing on-call toil for engineering teams at companies like DoorDash, Coinbase, and Snowflake.
Sentry is an application monitoring platform built for developers - giving engineering teams real-time visibility into errors, performance bottlenecks, and crashes across web, mobile, and backend stacks. Started as an open-source side project in 2008, it now serves more than four million developers and 100,000+ organizations including Disney, Microsoft, Atlassian, and GitHub.
Tigera is the creator of Calico, the open-source standard for Kubernetes networking and security that powers more than a million clusters every day. From its San Jose headquarters, the company sells Calico Cloud and Calico Enterprise - SaaS and on-prem platforms that bolt active runtime security, zero-trust microsegmentation, and observability onto container environments at any scale.
Spiros Xanthos is the Founder and CEO of Resolve AI, the San Francisco-based agentic AI company building autonomous software reliability engineering at unicorn valuation. A serial entrepreneur who co-created OpenTelemetry, sold two companies (Log Insight to VMware, Omnition to Splunk), and went on to run Splunk's $400M+ observability business before founding Resolve AI in 2024. In under 18 months the company raised $160M, reached a $1.5B valuation, and landed customers including Coinbase, DoorDash, and Salesforce - built on the conviction that engineers spend 70% of their time keeping software running rather than building it.
Jerry M. Kennelly co-founded Riverbed Technology in 2002 and spent 16 years building it from a two-person startup into a billion-dollar enterprise serving 30,000 customers across every Forbes Global 100 company. A finance executive turned visionary operator, Kennelly combined rigorous business discipline with Silicon Valley boldness - taking Riverbed public on NASDAQ in 2006, engineering nine acquisitions, and watching its market cap peak near $6 billion in 2011. After retiring from Riverbed in April 2018, he became Chairman and CEO of Scandic Capital LLC and joined the board of cybersecurity firm Tenable.
Raju Datla is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Fabrix.ai (formerly CloudFabrix), an AI-native IT operations platform he founded in 2015. Before Fabrix.ai, he sold two companies to Cisco - Jahi Networks (~$16M, 2004) and Cloupia ($125M, 2012), the latter becoming the foundation of Cisco's UCS management suite. At Fabrix.ai, he is pioneering Agentic AI for enterprise IT operations through a Robotic Data Automation Fabric that unifies data ingestion, AI agent orchestration, and workflow automation at scale.
Gabriel Bayomi Tinoco Kalejaiye is a Brazilian-born engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Openlayer, a San Francisco-based AI governance and observability platform. After earning his MS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon and working as a Machine Learning Engineer at Apple - where he contributed to both Siri and the secretive Vision Pro project - he left with two colleagues to solve the problem that haunted every AI team: models that look great in testing but fail in the real world. Openlayer provides enterprises with evaluation, monitoring, and compliance tooling across the full AI lifecycle, from prototype to production. The company raised a $14.5M Series A in May 2025, grew nearly 5x in 2024, and is now a recognized vendor in Gartner's 2026 Market Guide for AI Evaluation and Observability Platforms.
Zain Asgar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gimlet Labs, a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company building the world's first multi-silicon inference cloud. With a PhD from Stanford in electrical engineering focused on GPU energy modeling, Asgar previously led engineering at Google AI (where his work became Google Lens) and founded Pixie Labs, a Kubernetes-native observability platform acquired by New Relic in 2020. At Gimlet Labs, he is tackling one of AI's most pressing infrastructure challenges: making AI inference 3-10x more efficient by intelligently routing workloads across heterogeneous hardware including NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, ARM, and specialized accelerators like Cerebras.
Bogomil Balkansky is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most storied venture capital firms, where he focuses on investments in cloud infrastructure, developer tools, DevOps, observability, and enterprise SaaS. Born in Bulgaria after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he studied mathematics at Cornell University before earning an MBA from Stanford GSB. He spent eight years at VMware growing server virtualization revenue 10x and expanding the customer base from 5,000 to 300,000, was an early employee at Bebop (acquired by Google for $397M), then led go-to-market for Google Cloud's Recruiting Solutions. He joined Sequoia in 2020 and has backed companies including Vanta, Wiz, Temporal, Chainguard, Pydantic, and Mutiny. Known for his intuition-driven investment style and deep connections across the Bulgarian and Silicon Valley tech ecosystems.
Brendan Gregg is an Australian systems performance engineer at OpenAI, where he works on datacenter optimizations for ChatGPT. He invented flame graphs and the USE Method, pioneered eBPF observability, and is the author of landmark books including 'Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud'. His work is credited with saving the industry over $1 billion in compute costs. Previously an Intel Fellow and performance engineering leader at Netflix, Gregg is one of the most influential engineers in Linux and cloud infrastructure.
Cindy Sridharan is a distributed systems engineer, O'Reilly author, and influential technical writer based in San Francisco. Known online as @copyconstruct, she wrote the seminal O'Reilly book 'Distributed Systems Observability' and runs the Systems Distributed newsletter on Substack. She is widely respected for her long-form thinking on observability, testing in production, microservices architecture, and engineering culture. She spent years as an engineer at imgix, led the Prometheus user group in San Francisco, and has spoken at major industry conferences including QCon and GOTO. Her Medium essays on monitoring, testing, and systems thinking have shaped how a generation of engineers thinks about building resilient software.
Liz Fong-Jones is a Technical Fellow at Honeycomb.io, renowned SRE practitioner, co-author of 'Observability Engineering' (O'Reilly), and one of the most influential voices in the observability and platform engineering space. With 18+ years in software engineering spanning Google (11 years) and Honeycomb, she bridges deep technical expertise with fierce advocacy for labor rights, trans inclusion, and workplace equity. She led the Google Walkout Strike Fund in 2018, founded the Solidarity Fund by Coworker, and sits on the OpenTelemetry governance committee - all while speaking at every major SRE and DevOps conference on Earth.
Mat Ryer is a London-based Go programmer, open-source creator, author, and long-time host of the Go Time podcast. Known for building beloved Go tools like xbar (18k+ GitHub stars), moq, and the `is` testing framework, he has been writing Go since before its v1 release. He authored 'Go Programming Blueprints' and spent years as a principal engineer at Grafana Labs building AI agents and observability tools. His characteristic blend of deep technical craft, game-show energy, and dry British wit has made him one of the Go community's most recognizable voices.
Theo Schlossnagle is a serial entrepreneur, software engineer, and investor who has spent three decades pushing the edges of distributed systems and scalable infrastructure. Founder of OmniTI (1997), Circonus (2010), and General Partner at L42 Ventures, he is a Distinguished Member of the ACM, an IEEE member, co-chair of ACM's Queue Magazine, and the author of 'Scalable Internet Architectures'. Beyond software, he runs a butcher shop in Maryland, maintains a farm retreat in West Virginia, and has left Twitter for greener (and more federated) social pastures.