OllyGarden raises $4m seed to clean up OpenTelemetry data

OllyGarden raises $4m seed to clean up OpenTelemetry data

9 October 2026: OllyGarden says it has raised $4m in seed funding for software that finds and fixes bad telemetry before it reaches an observability backend. Datadog, Grafana Labs and Dash0, three companies that sell observability tools, are among the investors.

Not yet independently verified. The company's post names no lead investor, but Startup Rise Europe calls three investors lead backers. The company's text pages do not state a headquarters, and the Berlin term on this item comes from an earlier read of its page data that we did not repeat. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Who put in the $4m

The others named are Next Frontier Capital, Grand Ventures, ACTAI and DIG Ventures. The company's post names no lead investor, while Startup Rise Europe calls Next Frontier, Grand and ACTAI Ventures the lead backers and describes DIG as an existing investor that increased its stake.

Two investors are quoted by Startup Rise Europe. Rytis Vitkauskas of DIG Ventures says: "Telemetry quality is a foundational enterprise problem that everyone has and nobody owns." Amanda Terry, managing partner at ACTAI Ventures, calls OllyGarden "the trust layer for the data AI agents to run on".

The argument: coding agents write the code, telemetry is what is left to read

OllyGarden's launch post argues that coding agents now write much of the new code and AI agents increasingly investigate production problems, which makes telemetry the main source of truth between the two. Wide-net tools such as Java agents and eBPF capture everything but cannot tell what matters to a business.

The post gives one example: a batch job that ran for 59.7 seconds produced 633,718 spans, more than 90% of them from the database layer, about 19% orphaned from their trace and none describing the business operation. It also says the company's audits found 82% log duplication, 63% trace waste and sensitive data leaking into telemetry at five of six companies. Observability, it adds, is the second-largest infrastructure expense after compute.

What Minimum Viable Instrumentation contains

Minimum Viable Instrumentation, launched on 9 October, is defined as "the smallest set of telemetry that gives a team, and its agents, a foundation it can operate on". By default it instruments service boundaries: incoming requests, outbound calls to databases, queues and other services, and the context that links them. It adds a few business attributes so that traces can be searched during an incident.

Founder Juraci Paixão Kröhling writes: "More instrumentation is not better instrumentation." He says AI-generated code has created a flood of bad telemetry that buries the information teams need.

How Rose builds the baseline

The launch sits in Rose, OllyGarden's AI agent, which until now reviewed instrumentation that already existed and now also handles services that have none. The post describes six steps:

From codebase to pull request

Rose reads the codebase and writes an instrumentation plan that identifies service boundaries and external systems. It configures the OpenTelemetry SDK declaratively, in a configuration file, then adds targeted manual instrumentation and tunes libraries, for example by switching off duplicate database spans or DNS spans nobody queries.

It then adds business context. In a NestJS demo with Apple and Google sign-in, Rose added an attribute for the OAuth provider so that an engineer can isolate a failing flow. Finally it checks its work against a local OpenTelemetry Collector with sample telemetry, never sending data to a remote backend, and opens a pull request with the plan, configuration and code changes for an engineer to review.

The post says plain coding agents performed poorly on their own, suggesting outdated SDKs and breaking context propagation. Existing enterprise customers have Rose with Minimum Viable Instrumentation now, and new customers get a free trial.

A company built by OpenTelemetry contributors

OllyGarden's other product, Insights, detects telemetry quality problems across services and scores them by impact. The company also leads the Instrumentation Score, an open specification for rating telemetry quality that is hosted on GitHub, with eventual adoption by a neutral body such as the CNCF or an OpenTelemetry special interest group as the aim.

Kröhling, a Brazilian engineer who has lived in Germany since 2011, sits on the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee and is a CNCF Ambassador. The company's page says he worked at Red Hat and Grafana Labs, created the OpenTelemetry Collector Builder, Operator and load-balancer, and holds six patents. OllyGarden describes itself as remote-first and says it is not an observability backend vendor. It offers a free tier with no credit card, and its website says it has completed a SOC 2 Type II examination.

Our application performance management software category lists 18 products.

Company profile on TrustList: OllyGarden

Sources

• OllyGarden blog: Introducing Minimum Viable Instrumentation, 9 October 2026
• Startup Rise Europe: OllyGarden raises $4 mn, 9 October 2026
• OllyGarden: Our Company (read 2026-10-11), 11 October 2026
• OllyGarden homepage (read 2026-10-11), 11 October 2026