The Venture Codex

Participated · Seed · Jul 2025

OllyGarden addresses the problem of noisy, irrelevant, and incomplete “bad telemetry” by helping engineering teams prune wasteful telemetry and focus on high-value signals. Its flagship product, OllyGarden Insights, delivers an actionable Instrumentation Score that evaluates telemetry quality and provides concrete recommendations to improve instrumentation. The platform uses advanced telemetry meta-analysis to identify over- and under-instrumented services, guide targeted improvements, and reduce upstream compute and network costs. OllyGarden is vendor-neutral, compatible with OpenTelemetry, and can deliver value from small samples of telemetry without requiring customers to route all data through its solution. The company was founded in January 2025 by Juraci Paixão Kröhling and Yuri Oliveira Sá and runs a remote-first team distributed across Germany, Poland, Argentina, and Brazil, with roots in the US and Germany. OllyGarden recently raised $1.6M in a pre-seed round, demonstrating early market confidence. The team plans to collaborate closely with the OpenTelemetry community, promote the Instrumentation Score as an open standard, and expand the platform’s capabilities to set a new standard for observability quality.

Participated · Series B · Sep 2022

Isovalent is the creator of the open-source Cilium project and a provider of Isovalent Cilium Enterprise, a platform that delivers secure, observable cloud-native connectivity. Its product leverages eBPF to provide scalable multi-cloud networking, dynamic service load-balancing, service-identity aware firewalling, network and API-layer observability, transparent encryption, runtime security observability/enforcement, and a sidecar-free service mesh. Cilium technology has been selected for managed Kubernetes offerings including Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Anthos, and Amazon EKS Anywhere. Major platform engineering teams at enterprises such as Adobe, Bell Canada, Capital One, Datadog, Palantir, IKEA, and Sky use Isovalent to enable enterprise-grade connectivity. The company announced a $40M Series B to support growth. Isovalent intends to use the proceeds to expand its team to meet customer demand and to collaborate with ecosystem partners. Isovalent commercializes the open-source Cilium project with its newly launched Cilium Enterprise platform, aiming to connect, observe and secure cloud-native applications. The company leverages eBPF and deep Linux kernel expertise to provide networking visibility and advanced security features aligned with how developers and operators think about applications and data. Cilium already has notable adoption — Google selected it for its GKE data plane, and users include Adobe, Capital One, Datadog and GitLab. The founding team includes CEO Dan Wendlandt, formerly of Nicira/VMware working on Open vSwitch, and CTO Thomas Graf, who created Cilium after 15 years working on the Linux kernel. Financially, Isovalent announced a $29 million Series A to support product and commercial expansion. The company says its immediate focus is building out go-to-market efforts while continuing to develop the platform.