Groundcover acquires Israeli startup Wand for tens of millions of dollars
The company’s first acquisition combines groundcover’s production visibility with Wand’s technology for automatically optimizing Kubernetes resources.
Groundcover, a company developing a cloud infrastructure monitoring platform, is acquiring Israeli startup Wand for several tens of millions of dollars. Wand was founded in 2023 by Shon Lev-Ran and Shir Monether and raised approximately $4 million in a Seed round led by Angular Ventures. Following the acquisition, Wand’s founding team and 10 employees will join groundcover. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Wand develops technology for optimizing Kubernetes resources, enabling organizations to automatically and efficiently manage their cloud infrastructure. Its technology continuously analyzes workload behavior and makes decisions about vertical, horizontal and cluster-level resource allocation, allowing companies to adjust computing resources as demand changes.
Groundcover was founded in 2021 by CEO Shahar Azulay and CTO Yechezkel Rabinovich and currently serves more than 250 customers. This is the company’s first acquisition, coming about two months after it announced a $100 million funding round, bringing its total capital raised to $160 million.
Groundcover’s platform collects high-fidelity data on activity across cloud-based software and infrastructure, using eBPF and OpenTelemetry to give companies real-time visibility into their systems. The company’s BYOC architecture keeps the data inside customers’ own cloud environments. The platform can help development teams identify malfunctions, understand the causes of system slowdowns and pinpoint changes that preceded an issue.
The acquisition of Wand expands those capabilities from observing and understanding system activity to taking action. The combined platform will be able to use production data to make decisions and automatically implement infrastructure changes.
For example, if an AI-based service triggers a sudden increase in demand for computing power, the system can dynamically allocate additional resources. When demand falls, it can scale those resources back. Wand’s technology coordinates vertical scaling, which adjusts resources allocated to individual workloads, with horizontal scaling, which changes the number of workload replicas, and cluster scaling, which adjusts the underlying infrastructure. Rather than simply recommending changes for engineers to implement, the system can make those adjustments on live Kubernetes infrastructure.
The goal is to maintain performance and availability while avoiding the cost of allocating more computing capacity than necessary. Wand’s system runs inside the customer’s environment, close to the workloads and telemetry it uses to make its decisions.
“Observability has become much more than a tool engineers use to understand what went wrong,” said Shahar Azulay, CEO and co-founder of groundcover. “In an AI-native software development cycle, production data becomes context that agents use to build, troubleshoot, fix and operate software. But understanding is only part of the problem. For infrastructure to become autonomous, systems also need to act safely on what they know. Wand has spent years building exactly that capability for Kubernetes.”
Wand CEO and co-founder Shon Lev-Ran said the acquisition will combine the company’s ability to act on live infrastructure with groundcover’s broader understanding of what is happening in production.
“Right-sizing assumes we know the future,” Lev-Ran said. “Spoiler: we don't. Infrastructure changes continuously. Joining groundcover lets us combine Wand's ability to act on live infrastructure with a much deeper understanding of what is happening across production.”
