Cloud surveillance and security platform Datadog said Wednesday it acquired Metaplane, an AI-powered data observability launch.
The financial conditions for the transaction have not been disclosed.
In a press release, Datadog said the transaction “accelerates” the expansion of data into observability and is based on the launch of related products. Metaplane will continue to support existing and new customers through the provision of rebranded “Metaprene by Datadog.”
“Observability isn’t just about developers and IT teams. It’s now a critical part of the data team’s day-to-day responsibility, managing increasingly complex and business-critical workflows.” “This complexity becomes even more pronounced as more companies deploy AI applications. By integrating observability between applications and data, DataDOG helps organizations build trustworthy AI systems.”
MIT alumnus Kevin Who, former hubspot engineer Peter Kasinelli and former approach developer Guru Mahendran founded Metaplane in 2020.
Metaprene monitors data primarily using anomaly detection AI models trained with historical metadata. It attempts to establish lineage in a data warehouse, the system used for reporting and data analysis, and notifies stakeholders of the issue via selection tools (slack, Pagerduty, etc.). From these tools, users can mark alerts as expected changes or other, and Metaplane’s system learns over time.
Metaplane had previously raised a total of $222.2 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 businesses ensure confidence in the data that drives their business,” Hu said in a statement. “Collaboration with DataDog will bring data observability to tens of thousands of companies, leading the data and software teams closer together.”
Metaplane is the second acquisition of Datadog this year. In January, the company acquired QuickWit, a cloud-native search engine that is open source for logs.
It makes sense for DataDog to broaden its footprint with data observability. This could be an important business source for DataDog as it is a large and healthy market. The company recently reported better net profit than expected, but its full-year 2025 revenue forecast fell below what analysts had expected.
According to Grand View Research, the market for data observability tools was worth $2.14 billion in 2023 and could grow at a combined annual growth rate of 12.2% between 2024 and 2030. Of course, there is a tough competition. Large players include Monte Carlo, Crib, Manta, Observe, Better Stack, Collalogix, and elucidation data.
The challenge with Datadog is to make a good distinction between data observability products. This is intended to be done both through acquisition and internal projects such as data jobs and data stream monitoring.