$1 billion NYC-startup Dash0 acquires Berlin tech company to build software that fixes itself. Aug 17, 2026, 4:49 AM PT 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.

German-American software startup Dash0 has acquired Berlin-based Polar Signals, the companies announced on Monday. Dash0, founded by Mirko Novakovic in 2023, develops observability platforms for software teams. Polar Signals specialises in continuous profiling, allowing developers to track exactly where code consumes computing power and memory. Dash0 will integrate this technology into its platform, particularly targeting AI-era applications. The acquisition includes Polar Signals' development team and its "Great Lakes" storage engine, which Dash0 plans to use as the foundation for its SignalStore infrastructure, replacing ClickHouse. Dash0 is developing AI agent capabilities that will use profiling data to monitor and optimise software autonomously. A new "AutoTune" function will search for inefficient code and prepare improvement suggestions independently. The company recently raised $110 million in Series B funding, achieving unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation. Over 750 customers now use Dash0, including Zalando, Taco Bell, and The Telegraph.

Dash0 named to Redpoint's 2026 InfraRed 100. [SAN FRANCISCO] - May 27, 2026 - Dash0, the Agentic Observability platform built on OpenTelemetry, today announced it has been named to Redpoint Ventures' 2026 InfraRed 100, an annual list recognizing ascendant private companies that are building the foundational infrastructure powering the next wave of AI innovation. Redpoint is a venture capital firm that has invested at the leading edge of platform shifts for decades, backing generational companies like Snowflake, Twilio, Ramp, Stripe, HashiCorp, and Netflix. Redpoint launched the InfraRed 100 in 2023 to recognize emerging companies building the backbone of the AI era across developer tools, security, data, enterprise platforms, and beyond. Being named to the Redpoint InfraRed 100 reflects something Dash0 Inc. has believed since day one: observability shouldn't be a tax, and your data should belong to you, not your vendor. Dash0 Inc. is not just building a better observability tool, Dash0 Inc. is building the AI nervous system for production, and going from 100 to 700 customers in under a year tells Dash0 Inc. this category is ready for it.Mirko Novakovic, CEO and Co-Founder of Dash0 To commemorate its fourth year, Redpoint is convening InfraRed 100 founders at SFMOMA for an evening of celebration and intimate discussion of the next chapter to come in the AI era. The full list of InfraRed 100 honorees - and Redpoint's perspective on the enabling layer powering AI adoption at scale and the year to come - is available here. Dash0 is the Agentic Observability platform built on OpenTelemetry. Founded in 2023 in Germany and headquartered in New York, Dash0 provides engineering teams with a single, open platform to ingest, correlate, and act on signals from any stack without vendor lock-in, proprietary agents, or unpredictable pricing. Through its Agent0 platform, Dash0 is evolving beyond observability into autonomous operational intelligence: AI agents that monitor, diagnose, and resolve production issues before humans are ever paged. Dash0 is backed by Balderton Capital, Accel, Cherry Ventures, and DIG Ventures, and serves over 600 customers worldwide, including Zalando, Taco Bell, and The Telegraph. Redpoint Ventures partners with founders redefining how people live and work through technology. Since 1999, Redpoint has invested across seed, early, and growth stages in companies including Snowflake, Stripe, Twilio, HashiCorp, Ramp, Netflix, Looker, and Nubank. The firm manages $7.0 billion across multiple funds. Learn more at redpoint.com. Becki Howland