Despite significant advancements in firms’ information structures over the past two decades, monitoring and tracing tools have not kept pace, posing a challenge for engineering teams to identify the root cause of errors and latency issues.
While Israeli developer Eden Federman believes distributed tracing holds the key to unlocking superior observability, his experience suggests that implementation challenges may hinder adoption rates. He went on to co-found a startup specializing in simplifying the monitoring of complex, cloud-based technologies that efficiently handle enormous data volumes, a scenario all too common today?
While he and CEO Ari Recht have no professional ties, a surprising personal connection exists: the two men’s wives are indeed first cousins. Faced with a challenge, Federman turned to Recht, an experienced funding banker standing prominently in the photograph, and requested his input: “Would you be willing to share an idea with me?” The events rapidly evolved into a series of conferences. “As our collaboration deepened, so did my admiration for his potential; the more time we spent together, the more I recognized that he needed guidance on the entrepreneurial side of things,” Recht told TechCrunch.
Unlike Federman, Recht eschews coding in favor of cultivating a deep understanding of startups, which serves him well as the public face of tech-savvy Odigos, where he has spent considerable time. Together, they formed a compelling team that earned the endorsement of Y Combinator, which typically takes place in person in San Francisco.
Recht reflected on their time together, stating, “We truly thrived as a collective unit for six months, which proved to be an incredibly fruitful period for our group.” The spotlight had finally assembled the angelic traders to back Odigos. Named initially as Keyval, the corporation secured funding through a SAFE notice at YC’s Demo Day, followed by a recent $13 million round led by Boston-based venture capital firm Enterprise Information.
At the core of Odigos, one key player stands out: Ben Sigelman, co-founder of Lightstep and co-creator of OpenTelemetry, an open-source observability framework being harnessed by Odigos to drive its operations. While Recht deemed it “superior,” he acknowledged that the system was also “very tough” to put into practice and set up, a challenge that must be carefully considered. As a result, Odigos will have the opportunity to offer high-end “OpenTelemetry” solutions to its clients.
Odigos’ target market lies at the intersection of scale and sophistication, focusing on large corporations that are too established to be considered startups but not yet behemoths like Google. Giant enterprises can frequently establish self-sufficiency in distributed tracing, leveraging the open-source resources available from Odigos. Businesses seeking assistance from non-tech-savvy customers need help implementing complex solutions that would otherwise demand extensive manual labor.
This opportunity is available here. A historic era known as the Prolonged Berkeley Packet Filter, a technology empowering developers to craft packets that execute swiftly within the Linux operating system. While various startups leverage this technology in diverse ways, Odigos found a unique approach that effortlessly unlocked automated distributed tracing without compromising performance or necessitating code modifications.
That’s significantly useful for large-scale enterprise organizations, according to Recht. “When dealing with vast numbers of purposes or microservices – 25,000 is an extreme example – manual management becomes utterly impractical. Even attempting to do so would result in significant inefficiencies.”
As a driving force behind open-source innovation, Federman and many of Odigos’ team members actively contribute to prominent projects such as eBPF, OpenTelemetry, and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, showcasing their commitment to collaborative development. By analyzing this data, they also identify potential gaps in meeting the needs of business customers. One factor contributing to clients’ trust in our company, according to Federman, is our commitment to transparency as an open-source provider.
While many startups with an open-source component mirror this model, Odigos’ industrial offering diverges from the norm. According to Federman, Odigos’ open-source model excels in managing individual Kubernetes clusters, whereas its enterprise edition efficiently supports multiple environments.
Odigos empowers large enterprises to leverage distributed tracing without diverting from core development resources or requiring specialized expertise. Moreover, Odigos seamlessly integrates with existing performance monitoring tools, be it Datadog, New Relic, or Instana, whose CEO Christine Yen recently invested in Odigos’ latest funding round.
A diverse group of investors from Firestreak Ventures, Mango Capital, Salesforce Ventures, and individual angel investors have joined the latest round. The newly secured funding will enable the startup to refine its solution, invest in its go-to-market strategy, and establish a new headquarters in Boston, where its lead investor is based and where the founders ultimately plan to relocate. While this approach may bring them closer to their goals, the company recently covertly signed a substantial proof-of-concept agreement with a prominent American corporation.
