Snowflake to acquire observability platform Observe

On January 8, cloud data company Snowflake announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Observe, subject to regulatory approval. Observe is an observability platform—a tool that helps companies monitor software systems and data for performance issues and bugs. While the terms of the transaction were not officially disclosed, reports value the deal at around $1 billion. If confirmed, this would represent Snowflake’s largest acquisition to date, surpassing its March 2022 purchase of Streamlit, which was valued at $800 million. Observe itself was most recently valued at $750 million as of July 2025, according to the company, and has raised $316 million in venture capital.

The acquisition aims to integrate Observe’s product into Snowflake’s environment to create a unified platform for telemetry data, which includes logs, metrics, and traces collected from software systems. Built on Apache Iceberg and OpenTelemetry architectures, this integration is intended to allow users to proactively monitor their data stack. According to a Snowflake blog post, the combined setup will help customers spot and fix performance issues 10x faster than before, addressing the scaling challenges of managing massive volumes of data.

The transaction highlights deep historical and corporate connections between the two entities. Both Snowflake and Observe were incubated at Sutter Hill Ventures, a venture capital firm. Mike Speiser, a managing director at Sutter Hill Ventures, served as Snowflake’s founding CEO from 2012 to 2014. Jeremy Burton, the current CEO of Observe, has served on Snowflake’s board of directors since 2015. Observe was founded in 2017 by Jacob Leverich, Jonathan Trevor, and Ang Li, and launched its first observability product in 2018, which was built on a centralized Snowflake database. The startup’s venture backing includes funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, and Madrona.

This deal follows a broader wave of consolidation in the data industry, as companies seek to expand their product suites to offer comprehensive, one-stop-shop platforms. The acquisition of Observe could be a sign that data company consolidation will continue throughout 2026. Snowflake has been highly active in this trend, having completed or announced several acquisitions in 2025. These include Crunchy Data, Datavolo, and Select Star, a data governance and metadata management platform that helps organizations understand and trace their data at scale.

Why it matters

Snowflake’s acquisition of Observe aims to provide a unified platform for telemetry data, allowing customers to monitor their data stack and address performance issues more efficiently.