The American software startup Dash0 is going on a shopping spree: the New York City-headquartered observability company, founded by Mirko Novakovic, is acquiring Berlin-based startup Polar Signals, the companies announced on Monday.
The acquisition is strategically interesting for Dash0 for several reasons. Polar Signals specializes in what is known as continuous profiling. Put simply, the technology allows developers to see exactly where their code is consuming computing power and memory — and where applications are becoming slow or expensive as a result. This is becoming particularly relevant amid the AI boom. Dash0 now plans to integrate the technology directly into its own platform.
AI agents are supposed to hunt for performance issues themselves
Founded in 2023, Dash0 develops an observability platform for software teams. Companies can use it to monitor what is happening across their IT systems, identify errors, and analyze the performance of their applications.
The acquisition is intended to take that analysis significantly deeper. Instead of merely detecting that a system is running slowly or consuming an unusual amount of resources, developers will be able to trace the cause down to individual functions and lines of code.
What is even more interesting, however, is what Dash0 plans to do with that data: it wants to make it accessible not only to humans, but also to AI agents.
The company is working on so-called agentic capabilities, in which AI systems not only write software but also monitor and improve it while it is running. In the future, profiling data will feed directly into this process through Dash0’s Agent0.
A new feature called “AutoTune,” for example, is designed to continuously search for inefficient code. If the system identifies opportunities to reduce CPU or memory usage, it will automatically generate suggestions for improvements and prepare pull requests. The goal is for software to increasingly optimize itself.
“Software is increasingly being written and operated by agents,” says Dash0 founder and CEO Mirko Novakovic. Those agents therefore need precise information about “what code actually does” — down to the individual line of code, the kernel, and the costs it generates.
The deal also gives Dash0 new database technology
The deal, however, is about more than simply adding another product feature. Dash0 is also acquiring the Polar Signals engineering team — and with it expertise that could become important for the unicorn’s technical infrastructure.
Polar Signals has been developing its own storage engine called “Great Lakes,” specifically designed to handle large volumes of profiling data. Dash0 is now planning a major overhaul of its own infrastructure: Great Lakes is set to become the foundation of SignalStore, replacing ClickHouse.
That could become increasingly important for Dash0 as the volume of data on its platform continues to grow. According to the company, Dash0 now has more than 750 customers, including Taco Bell and British newspaper The Telegraph (which, like Business Insider, is owned by Axel Springer).
Dash0 recently reached a $1 billion valuation
For US investors and the enterprise software industry, Novakovic is not a newcomer. Before launching Dash0, he founded Instana, an application performance monitoring startup that competed in the same broad market as companies such as Datadog and New Relic. IBM acquired Instana in 2020 as part of its push into cloud and application management.
Three years later, Novakovic teamed up with several former Instana employees to start Dash0. While the company has strong German roots and engineering ties to Europe, Dash0 is headquartered in New York City and is targeting the global enterprise software market.
Most recently, Dash0 raised $110 million in a Series B funding round that valued the company at $1 billion, giving it unicorn status. Its investors include Balderton Capital, Accel, Cherry Ventures, DTCP, DIG Ventures, July Fund, and T.Capital.
With Polar Signals, Dash0 is not simply buying additional features. The deal also offers a glimpse of where Novakovic wants to take the company: away from being a traditional monitoring tool and toward becoming a platform where AI agents can identify problems in code — and, ideally, fix them themselves before developers even need to intervene.
This story originally appeared on Gründerszene and is courtesy of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces, and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from Gründerszene, POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet, and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms.
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