Although this was never publicly announced, for the last 2+ years, FirstMark was the lead investor in an exciting seed-stage company called Timber, alongside a great group of folks and firms including NextView, Notation, Addition, Lux Capital, Nat Turner, Zach Weinberg and Zach Perret.
Over time, Timber developed Vector, a very interesting open source project focused on observability data. Vector is effectively a “routing layer”, a high-performance observability data pipeline that enables customers to collect, transform, and route all their logs, metrics, and traces.
It looks like this:
Vector has had a lot of traction lately, and has reached a current total of 6.3k github stars and 113 contributors.
A couple of hours ago, Datadog announced its acquisition of Timber, a very logical and strategic addition to Datadog’s platform.
Timber certainly had attractive options to continue building the company as a standalone business, but ultimately decided that combining forces with Datadog was the best way to accelerate widespread adoption of Vector.
It was a real pleasure working with the two very talented co-founders of the company, CEO Zach Sherman and CTO Ben Johnson, as well as the rest of the Timber team. Congratulations to all and to Datadog for a very judicious acquisition.
P.S. Funny when one presenter at Data Driven NYC acquires another presenter 🙂