OllyGarden Raises $4M Funding to Cut Telemetry Waste Before It Reaches Your Observability Bill

OllyGarden, the Berlin-based telemetry quality platform, has raised $4 million in venture funding backed by Next Frontier Capital, Grand Ventures, and ACTAI Ventures, with existing investor DIG Ventures participating again. Observability leaders Datadog, Grafana Labs, and Dash0 made additional strategic investments.

The round follows a $1.6 million pre-seed in July 2025 and brings OllyGarden’s total funding to approximately $5.6 million. The company did not disclose its valuation.

The funding accompanies the launch of Minimum Viable Instrumentation (MVI), a new capability for OllyGarden’s Rose AI agent that identifies where instrumentation is missing and recommends a baseline for OpenTelemetry data collection .

OllyGarden Funding Overview By CREDX Media

Startup Name	OllyGarden
Founders	Juraci Paixão Kröhling, Yuri Oliveira Sá
Founded	2025
HQ	Berlin, Germany
Round	Seed Funding
Amount Raised	$4M
Valuation	Not disclosed
Category	Observability, Telemetry Quality, OpenTelemetry
Key Investors	Next Frontier Capital, Grand Ventures, ACTAI Ventures, DIG Ventures
Strategic Investors	Datadog, Grafana Labs, Dash0
Previous Round	$1.6M Pre-Seed (July 2025)
Total Funding Raised	~$5.6M
Key Product	Rose AI agent, OllyGarden Insights, Instrumentation Score
Claimed Impact	Up to 85% reduction in log volumes

💡 Use of Funds

• Platform Development: Advancing OllyGarden’s telemetry quality platform and AI agent capabilities.
• MVI Expansion: Supporting the launch and scaling of Minimum Viable Instrumentation.
• Product Innovation: Further developing tools to fix telemetry before it reaches observability backends.

Startup Overview: OllyGarden

What OllyGarden Is Building in Simple Words

OllyGarden has built a platform that evaluates the quality of telemetry data before it reaches observability systems, identifies bad or irrelevant logs, metrics, and traces, and generates source-level fixes that engineers can apply .

• Rose AI Agent: An AI-powered “OpenTelemetry Engineer” that reviews instrumentation, suggests improvements, and delivers fixes as pull requests for human review .
• OllyGarden Insights: Analyzes telemetry streams to assess instrumentation against best practices, identifying services that are over- or under-instrumented .
• Instrumentation Score: An open-source standardized metric for objectively assessing OpenTelemetry instrumentation quality, with support from Datadog, Grafana Labs, Honeycomb, New Relic, and Splunk .
• Minimum Viable Instrumentation (MVI): The new capability that discovers where instrumentation is missing and recommends a baseline—especially useful as AI-generated code increases telemetry volume .

Why OllyGarden Matters

1. Bad Telemetry Is a Cost and Insight Problem Industry estimates suggest up to 90% of telemetry data goes unused . One company reported generating about 3 petabytes of uncompressed telemetry per month, acknowledging that “a lot of it is bad telemetry” .
2. Runaway Costs From Unchecked Instrumentation An engineer in Berlin had a single high-cardinality metric generating over **$20,000 worth of telemetry per month** without clear value. Reducing cardinality cut the cost to $2,000 .
3. AI-Generated Code Is Making It Worse Founder Juraci Paixão Kröhling said the growing use of AI-generated code has contributed to rising telemetry volumes, making it harder to find critical information in the noise .
4. The Founder Built the Standards He’s Now Productizing Kröhling is a member of the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee and creator of the OpenTelemetry Operator and Collector Builder. He has been a top contributor to the project since 2019 .

Startup Story: From OpenTelemetry Governance to a Company Fixing the Data Layer

OllyGarden was founded in 2025 by Juraci Paixão Kröhling and Yuri Oliveira Sá. Kröhling’s background is unusual for a startup founder: he maintained Jaeger since 2018, contributed to OpenTelemetry since 2019, created the OpenTelemetry Operator (2019) and Collector Builder (2021), and served as an approver for Collector Contrib and Collector core .

That deep involvement in the open-source observability ecosystem shaped OllyGarden’s founding thesis. Kröhling saw firsthand how auto-instrumentation tools, left unconfigured, could collect far more data than teams needed—driving up costs and obscuring useful signals .

The company emerged from stealth in July 2025 with a $1.6 million pre-seed led by DIG Ventures, alongside strategic investments from Datadog Ventures, Grafana Labs, and Dash0 . The initial product focused on evaluating telemetry quality and generating fixes.

The $4 million round now supports the launch of MVI, extending Rose’s role from remediation (fixing existing instrumentation) to baseline setting (telling teams what to instrument in the first place) .

Our Take on OllyGarden

OllyGarden is solving the least glamorous problem in observability—bad data—and that’s precisely why it matters.

Observability platforms have spent a decade making it easier to collect telemetry. The result is an explosion of data that costs a fortune to store and analyze, while often failing to answer the questions engineers actually have. OllyGarden’s insight is that the problem isn’t collection—it’s quality. By fixing telemetry at the source, before it reaches Datadog or Grafana, the company addresses both cost and insight in one move.

The $4 million round is justified on multiple fronts: a founder who helped build the OpenTelemetry standards, strategic investments from the three companies most exposed to telemetry waste (Datadog, Grafana, Dash0), and a clear product thesis with measurable impact (up to 85% log reduction, per the company) .

The real risk is adoption friction. OllyGarden’s value proposition requires engineering teams to change how they instrument code—a process that adds work upfront to save costs later. As RuntimeWire noted, “the commercial test is whether engineering teams will make instrumentation quality a continuing part of code review” .

For now, OllyGarden has capital, strategic backing from the incumbents, and a founder with unmatched credibility in the OpenTelemetry ecosystem.

Founder Background: The OpenTelemetry Veteran Building the Trust Layer

Juraci Paixão Kröhling (Co-Founder) brings a combination of open-source credibility and enterprise experience to OllyGarden. As a member of the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee and creator of the OpenTelemetry Operator and Collector Builder, he has been directly involved in shaping the standards the company now productizes .

His career includes time at Red Hat and Grafana Labs, where he helped build an OpenTelemetry-focused team .

Yuri Oliveira Sá (Co-Founder) is an SRE and OpenTelemetry specialist who partnered with Kröhling on the founding thesis that automated instrumentation can collect far more information than teams need .

The founding team’s deep roots in the OpenTelemetry community give OllyGarden a credibility advantage that competitors cannot easily replicate.

The Telemetry Quality Race Nobody Expected

OllyGarden operates at the intersection of two markets: observability platforms and developer tooling.

Observability incumbents including Datadog, Grafana Labs, and Dash0 have made strategic investments—a signal that they view OllyGarden as complementary infrastructure rather than a competitive threat. Reducing telemetry waste benefits their customers’ budgets and their own platform economics.

The competitive moat, if it materializes, is OllyGarden’s open-source contribution strategy. The Instrumentation Score initiative has support from Datadog, Grafana Labs, Honeycomb, New Relic, and Splunk—creating a standardized vocabulary for telemetry quality that OllyGarden is positioned to serve.

Founder Intelligence: What Founders Can Learn from OllyGarden

• Build the standard, then build the product: Kröhling helped create OpenTelemetry and the Instrumentation Score before founding a company to serve those standards. Deep ecosystem involvement compounds into founder advantage.
• Solve the problem your customers already pay for: Telemetry waste shows up directly on observability bills. OllyGarden’s value proposition is measurable in dollars, not abstractions.
• Strategic investors can be distribution partners: Datadog, Grafana, and Dash0 aren’t just writing checks—they’re validating the problem and potentially opening doors to their customer bases.
• Open-source as go-to-market: The Instrumentation Score creates a common vocabulary that OllyGarden’s product can serve. Open-source contributions build credibility and awareness.

Investor Intelligence: Why This Round Gets Premium Capital

Next Frontier Capital, Grand Ventures, and ACTAI Ventures backed the round, with DIG Ventures returning as an existing investor .

Rytis Vitkauskas, Partner at DIG Ventures, framed the thesis: “Telemetry quality is a foundational enterprise problem that everyone has and nobody owns, and now AI has made it urgent. When the basics cannot be relied on, everything built above them breaks, and it breaks faster now because there is no human in the loop to catch it” .

Amanda Terry, Managing Partner at ACTAI Ventures, added: “Every wave of AI has needed someone to make its input data trustworthy before the wave could deliver on its promise. Agentic operations are at exactly that inflection point” .

The strategic investments from Datadog, Grafana Labs, and Dash0 signal that the incumbents see OllyGarden as infrastructure they want to support—not a threat to eliminate.

The Road Ahead for OllyGarden

Expansion Targets

With $4 million in capital, OllyGarden will:

• Advance its telemetry quality platform and AI agent capabilities
• Scale Minimum Viable Instrumentation across customer codebases
• Continue developing the Instrumentation Score as an open standard
• Expand adoption across retail, financial services, and enterprise software customers

Competitive Response

Expect:

• Observability platforms to deepen native telemetry quality features
• OpenTelemetry tooling startups to emerge targeting similar problems
• AI coding assistants to integrate instrumentation guidance
• OllyGarden’s moat: founder credibility + strategic incumbent backing + open-source standards position

Conclusion

OllyGarden’s $4 million funding validates the thesis that telemetry quality is a foundational problem that AI makes urgent. The company’s Rose AI agent, Instrumentation Score, and new MVI capability address a market where up to 90% of data goes unused and costs spiral unchecked.

Market tailwinds favor OllyGarden: rising telemetry volumes from AI-generated code, strategic backing from observability incumbents, and a founder with unmatched credibility in the OpenTelemetry ecosystem.

For deep analysis of observability funding, developer tool innovation, and companies reshaping software infrastructure, explore CREDX Media for comprehensive coverage of startup funding trends, valuation intelligence, and founder playbooks.

Want the latest funding news and market insights delivered straight to your inbox? Subscribe to CredX Letters for verified deal terms, valuation benchmarks, and daily macro signals.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is OllyGarden’s total funding and latest round size?
OllyGarden has raised approximately $5.6 million total. Its $4 million venture round was backed by Next Frontier Capital, Grand Ventures, and ACTAI Ventures in October 2026, following a $1.6 million pre-seed in July 2025 .

2. How much did OllyGarden raise in its latest round and who led the investment?
OllyGarden raised $4 million backed by Next Frontier Capital, Grand Ventures, and ACTAI Ventures, with participation from existing investor DIG Ventures and strategic investments from Datadog, Grafana Labs, and Dash0 .

3. What is the valuation of OllyGarden?
OllyGarden did not disclose its post-money valuation. The company has raised approximately $5.6 million in total disclosed funding .

4. Who are the major investors in OllyGarden?
Major investors include Next Frontier Capital, Grand Ventures, ACTAI Ventures, and DIG Ventures. Datadog, Grafana Labs, and Dash0 made additional strategic investments .

5. What was OllyGarden’s pre-seed round size?
OllyGarden raised $1.6 million in pre-seed funding in July 2025, led by DIG Ventures with strategic investments from Datadog Ventures, Grafana Labs, and Dash0 .

6. Who are OllyGarden’s founders?
OllyGarden was founded in 2025 by Juraci Paixão Kröhling and Yuri Oliveira Sá. Kröhling is a member of the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee and creator of the OpenTelemetry Operator .

7. What is OllyGarden’s business model?
OllyGarden operates a B2B SaaS model, selling its telemetry quality platform to engineering and observability teams. Pricing is not publicly disclosed.

8. What is Minimum Viable Instrumentation (MVI)?
MVI is a capability in OllyGarden’s Rose AI agent that identifies where instrumentation is missing and recommends a baseline for OpenTelemetry data collection, helping teams avoid both over- and under-instrumentation.

9. How does OllyGarden’s Rose AI agent work?
Rose reviews existing instrumentation, identifies quality issues, and generates source-level fixes delivered as pull requests for human review. MVI extends this to repositories with little or no instrumentation .

10. What is the Instrumentation Score?
The Instrumentation Score is an open-source standardized metric for assessing OpenTelemetry instrumentation quality, with support from Datadog, Grafana Labs, Honeycomb, New Relic, and Splunk.

11. What impact has OllyGarden claimed for customers?
OllyGarden says it has helped businesses identify opportunities to reduce log volumes by as much as 85% over the past year. The company reports no sample size or methodology for this figure.