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Full stack observability for cloud teams that want broad telemetry without a volume based vendor bill.
about 250 customers · about 150 employees
“Closing at any price” on the first dozen opportunities gave the founders procurement lessons, customer proof, and confidence to sell the next account.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Groundcover is a full stack observability platform for engineering teams that need logs, metrics, and traces without restricting what they collect to control a usage bill. Co-founders Shahar Azoulay and Chez started in late 2021 after seeing teams repeatedly instrument production software, then sample or disable telemetry when vendors charged by data volume. Their bet was eBPF: a kernel level sensor that could observe application behavior without requiring code instrumentation. The early version had no UI; customers used its telemetry with open source Grafana dashboards. Its first customer, Lemonade, signed about three months after the company began. Groundcover later adopted a bring your own cloud model: the customer keeps the data plane in its own environment and pays its cloud costs directly, while Groundcover charges based on monitored hosts. The founder reported about $20 million ARR, roughly 250 customers, and 150 employees, with R&D and product in Tel Aviv and go to market focused on North America. Its path illustrates how a technical wedge can become a broader replacement product only after product parity, packaging, and sales confidence catch up.
For an infrastructure product selling to heads of DevOps, the fastest route to credible conversations is usually founder access to engineering leaders, followed by a narrowly scoped technical proof.
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Data credibility: Shahar Azoulay, the co-founder and CEO, reported about $20 million ARR, roughly 250 customers, and about 150 employees in the interview. These are founder statements carried in the interview transcript, not independently audited figures. Lemonade is named as the first customer; the $10,000 annual initial contract and later $30 per host per month list price are also described by the founder. The source does not establish gross margins or independently verify the revenue.
The first dollar arrived when Groundcover sold its sensor and telemetry capability to Lemonade, around three months after starting. The initial offer was not yet a complete observability interface: the customer could build dashboards in open source Grafana.
A flywheel began with a technical wedge that was easy to test and a buyer group that already felt the cost of missing telemetry. Groundcover’s eBPF sensor gathered high fidelity signals without asking developers to instrument every service, and its first customer could use that output in Grafana.
Enterprise infrastructure sales can feel quiet because evaluation, security review, deployment, and incumbent migration all take time. Groundcover’s founders had to learn to sell while the product was evolving, and early deals did not automatically become full replacements for Datadog.
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