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Snowflake agrees to acquire observability startup Observe, which was built on its database

Observe ran on Snowflake from its first day and counted Snowflake Ventures among its investors; The Information had put the price at about $1 billion, which would be Snowflake's largest deal.

ASAcquired deals deskNorth America8 January 2026 · 3 min read
Snowflake acquires Observe
Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

Snowflake said on January 8, 2026, that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Observe, a San Mateo, California, company that sells AI-powered observability software for monitoring and troubleshooting applications in production.

Snowflake did not disclose the price. Before the announcement, The Information reported, citing people familiar with the talks, that the deal valued Observe at about $1 billion, according to SiliconANGLE and Techzine. That would be more than Snowflake paid for Streamlit, its largest previous acquisition at $800 million in 2022.

The deal is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. Snowflake said Observe's platform would be integrated directly into the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.

What Observe built

Observe collects logs, metrics and traces, the three main kinds of telemetry that software systems produce, and links them in what it calls a unified context graph. Its main product is an AI site reliability engineer (SRE), an agent that investigates incidents, spots anomalies and suggests root causes. Snowflake said the tool could help teams resolve production issues up to ten times faster.

From the start, Observe stored its data in Snowflake rather than in a purpose-built observability database. Snowflake argued that this design lets customers keep all of their telemetry at lower cost, instead of sampling data or discarding it after short retention windows, which it said many enterprises had been forced to do as AI applications generate more logs and traces.

When it raised a Series C in 2025, Observe named Tekion, Topgolf, mParticle, Dialpad and Truveta as customers. It said its revenue had roughly tripled over the previous year, its enterprise customer count had doubled, its net revenue retention was 180% and it was processing more than 150 petabytes of telemetry.

“Observability is fundamentally a data problem, and Observe joining Snowflake is a natural extension of their AI Data Cloud, allowing us to accelerate our observability solution at true enterprise scale.”Jeremy Burton, CEO, Observe
Funding historyTotal raised n/a
2025Series CSutter Hill Ventures$156m

Why Snowflake is buying

The acquisition moves Snowflake into IT operations management, a software market that Gartner said grew 9.0% in 2024 to $51.7 billion. Snowflake chief executive Sridhar Ramaswamy said that as customers build more complex AI agents and data applications, reliability had become a business imperative rather than just an IT metric.

Snowflake said the combined product would rest on open standards, Apache Iceberg for table storage and OpenTelemetry for collecting telemetry, both projects it says it contributes to. Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake's executive vice president of product, told SiliconANGLE that an organisation's resilience is limited by how much data it can afford to ingest.

Techzine reported that Snowflake had considered using Observe for its own operations before the deal, citing The Register.

The leadership and the funding

Observe is led by chief executive Jeremy Burton. He said observability was fundamentally a data problem and that joining Snowflake was a natural extension of its AI Data Cloud. SiliconANGLE described Observe as nine years old at the time of the deal.

Burton argued that AI has moved the bottleneck in software from writing code to running and troubleshooting complex systems in production, and that pairing Observe's AI SRE with Snowflake would give customers faster answers and much better economics than separate observability tools.

In mid-2025 Observe closed a $156 million Series C led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with Madrona Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Snowflake Ventures and Capital One Ventures taking part. SiliconANGLE said the reported $1 billion valuation was about two and a half times the total the company had raised from investors. Neither company disclosed Observe's headcount.

A busy market for observability

The deal follows several other Snowflake acquisitions. Techzine listed Crunchy Data, Datavolo and TruEra among them, and in November 2025 Snowflake bought Datometry, a tool for moving data into Snowflake from rival platforms, SiliconANGLE reported. Sanjeev Mohan, principal analyst at SanjMo, said in Snowflake's announcement that the lines between data platforms and observability platforms were blurring as telemetry moves into general-purpose data systems.

Sources