Sawmills, the first AI-powered telemetry data management platform, has emerged from stealth with $10 million in seed funding. The oversubscribed funding round was led by Team8, with participation from Mayfield and Alumni Ventures. Founded by enterprise software veterans from New Relic, CloudBees, and Tricentis, Sawmills aims to help enterprises optimize their observability data management, reducing costs while improving system monitoring capabilities.

Tackling Observability Challenges

As modern software architectures become increasingly complex, observability has become essential for system reliability. However, organizations are struggling with high costs and data quality issues. The median company now spends nearly $2 million annually on observability, with frequent cost spikes. A notable case involved a financial services firm receiving an unexpected $65 million observability bill from Datadog.

"Engineering teams are grappling with both cost and quality challenges in their observability data," said Ronit Belson, CEO of Sawmills. "Missing data points, inconsistent formats, and duplicate data drive up costs and make root cause analysis unreliable and time-consuming. Observability has become the second-largest expense after cloud costs for most companies."

Belson further highlighted that many VPs of Engineering report that up to 90% of their observability data is unnecessary, yet companies continue paying to collect, process, and store it. Unanticipated cost surges remain a pressing issue—one company saw an additional $250,000 in fees in just one day due to a single developer’s mistake.

How Sawmills Optimizes Telemetry Data Management

Sawmills leverages AI to analyze telemetry data streams in real time, identifying cost-saving opportunities while improving data quality and system reliability. Key features of the platform include:

• Real-time Processing – AI-driven optimization of logs, metrics, and traces, detecting and correcting issues like missing data points and inconsistent formats.
• Comprehensive Control – Smart policies that enrich telemetry data, prevent system outages, and mitigate unplanned data spikes.
• Vendor Flexibility – Intelligent routing capabilities that allow businesses to switch between observability vendors without disrupting operations.

Organizations can implement Sawmills' recommendations with a single click and automate policies to prevent unexpected cost surges.

Industry Endorsements & Market Potential

Early adopters have already seen the benefits of Sawmills' AI-driven approach.

"Partnering with Sawmills has set us on a path toward optimizing our telemetry data—paving the way for streamlined costs, improved observability resource allocation aligned with our business needs, and enhanced data governance," said Edi Buslovich, VP of Engineering at Via.

Liran Grinberg, Managing Partner at Team8, emphasized the significance of Sawmills in enterprise cloud infrastructure:

"Telemetry data management is emerging as a critical new category in enterprise cloud infrastructure. The Sawmills team has a deep understanding of the problem and a comprehensive vision that perfectly positions them to own this new category. This isn't just about cost reduction; we believe Sawmills' approach to intelligent telemetry data management will massively improve observability and become essential infrastructure for modern enterprises."