Dash0, an AI-native observability platform, just raised a $35m funding round backed by Accel, Cherry Ventures and Dig Ventures, bringing the German startup’s total funding to $44.5m.
Founder and CEO Mirko Novakovic previously launched observability platform Instanta, which was acquired by IBM for $500m in 2021. “This time round, I really want to get it right to the end and do an IPO,” Novakovic tells Sifted.
Dash0's platform helps developers and platform engineers monitor and troubleshoot problems in their cloud, applications and infrastructure. It offers an AI agent, Agent0, which acts as a copilot, helping users find the root cause of issues more quickly by automating parts of the data analysis.
Since releasing its platform 10 months ago, Dash0 has more than 300 paying customers, including UK neobank Starling, carmaker Porsche and media publication The Telegraph.
The funding will be used to expand the team, to scale R&D operations and to ramp up go-to-market activities, which includes opening an office in Amsterdam.
What does Dash0 do?
Dash0 is a self-service platform which integrates into code stacks and other infrastructure layers (like clouds and servers) to help developers and platform engineers work out why their application is not working.
When something goes wrong on a user's application, Dash0’s Agent0 uses GenAI to analyse data, logs, metrics and traces to help identify where the problem is. For instance, it’ll tell users ‘there’s this line of code in part of your source code which is probably the root cause for that problem because of xyz’,” Novakovic says.
It does not suggest ways of fixing the problem but rather “speaks” to AI coding agents, like those made by AI like AI coding startup Cursor that can connect with Dash0 via an MCP server, so they can better understand the problem.
“We are providing the information in the format that another agent can actually do the coding,” Novakovic says, adding that a human in the loop is necessary at the moment but some problems in the future could get fixed fully automatically, without human intervention. “It’s pretty weird.”
What’s Dash0’s business model?
Dash0 charges $0.60 for every 1m logs (event messages) or spans (operations tracked in a request) it processes. This means its customers range from small users paying just $5 per year to large enterprises spending over $1m annually. Many of the companies Dash0 currently works with are startups and scale-ups.
The company is making “well above” a million dollars in revenue, says Novakovic, and aims to reach $20m by this time next year.
The deeptech startup plans to use the $35m to increase the size of its team from 45 to 110 by the end of the year, with a focus on hiring for roles in its R&D and product teams, which it hopes to double, to work on developing Agent0.
It’ll also increase headcounts in sales, marketing and content teams. The R&D team will remain in Europe, while sales teams will be split between offices in Amsterdam and New York. The team in the US is expected to increase from 6 to over 20 by the end of the year.
Dash0 received seven term sheets for this funding round, and Novakovic picked Berlin-based Cherry Ventures to increase European representation on his cap-table. “There are not so many European funds who can do A, B, C at some stages. So I said ‘probably this A round is the last chance for me to get a German/European VC in’,” he tells Sifted.
“I’m a big promoter of the European startup ecosystem.”
