Snowflake to Acquire Observability Platform Observe
▼ Summary
– Snowflake announced a definitive agreement to acquire the observability platform Observe on January 8, subject to regulatory approval.
– The acquisition will integrate Observe’s product into Snowflake’s to give customers a unified platform for telemetry data, helping them spot software and data issues faster.
– Observe was founded in 2017 and built its product on Snowflake’s database; it has raised nearly $500 million, with both companies sharing an incubation history at Sutter Hill Ventures.
– The deal is reportedly valued around $1 billion, which would be Snowflake’s largest acquisition, surpassing its 2022 purchase of Streamlit for $800 million.
– This move is part of a broader trend of consolidation in the data industry, as companies like Snowflake expand their AI-era offerings through acquisitions.
In a strategic move to bolster its data ecosystem, Snowflake has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Observe, a specialized observability platform. This acquisition, pending regulatory approval, aims to integrate Observe’s capabilities directly into Snowflake’s cloud data platform. The goal is to provide customers with a unified solution for collecting, storing, and analyzing telemetry data, such as logs, metrics, and traces from software systems. This integration promises to help organizations identify and resolve performance issues and bugs within their data and applications more efficiently.
Observe was established in 2017 by Jacob Leverich, Jonathan Trevor, and Ang Li. From its inception, the company’s architecture has been deeply intertwined with Snowflake, launching its first product on a centralized Snowflake database in 2018. The startup was incubated at Sutter Hill Ventures and has secured close to $500 million in venture funding from investors including Snowflake Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Madrona. The connection between the two companies runs deep: both were incubated at Sutter Hill Ventures, and Observe’s current CEO, Jeremy Burton, has served on Snowflake’s board since 2015.
The technical integration is designed to allow users to monitor their entire data stack proactively. According to Snowflake, this will enable teams to detect and rectify problems up to ten times faster than previously possible. This enhanced speed is becoming increasingly critical as the volume of data generated by modern applications and AI agents makes manual monitoring difficult to scale. The combined offering will establish a unified framework for telemetry data, built on industry-standard architectures like Apache Iceberg and OpenTelemetry, ensuring data is automatically collected and readily available for analysis.
While the specific financial terms remain confidential, industry reports suggest the transaction is valued at approximately $1 billion. If accurate, this would represent Snowflake’s largest acquisition to date, exceeding its $800 million purchase of Streamlit in 2022. Prior to this deal, Observe was most recently valued at $848 million as of July 2025.
This acquisition occurs amidst a broader trend of consolidation within the data technology sector. Companies are aggressively expanding their portfolios to become comprehensive, one-stop-shop partners, a strategy driven heavily by the demands of the AI era. Snowflake itself has been particularly active, completing several AI-focused acquisitions in 2025, including Crunchy Data, Datavolo, and the data governance platform Select Star. The Observe deal signals that this wave of strategic consolidation is likely to continue as major platforms seek to offer more integrated and powerful data management solutions.
(Source: TechCrunch)