Cribl has completed its third acquisition in four months, purchasing Tero, a California-based developer of software that helps engineers identify which telemetry data matters and which doesn't. The deal, announced this week, aims to position Cribl to "lead observability" into the AI era by combining Tero's intelligence layer technology with Cribl's existing data telemetry platform. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
Founded in 2025 and headquartered in California, Kentucky, Tero had raised $2.6 million in seed funding from NextView Ventures before the acquisition. The company's software measures how much of an organization's telemetry data is waste, identifies low-value data across observability tools, and helps engineers address the problem within their existing systems. Tero co-founders Ben Johnson and Adam Cohen, the company's CEO and CTO respectively, along with COO Nihar Singhal and the engineering team, are joining Cribl, with Johnson taking the role of vice president of observability. Johnson previously co-founded Timber, which created the open-source Vector observability pipeline technology that Datadog acquired in 2021.
According to Cribl co-founder and CEO Clint Sharp, Johnson "has spent a decade on the hardest problem in this space: helping engineers control their data and know which of it actually matters." The Tero team will guide Cribl's product roadmap across host monitoring, application performance monitoring, federated observability, and AI-native observability, bringing those capabilities into the Cribl platform used to collect, route, and optimize telemetry. Johnson stated that after watching what Cribl was shipping, it became clear his team could "either compete with them or build it together," choosing the latter because Cribl has the platform, customer base, and momentum to define how observability works in the age of AI.
Sharp told the outlet that the acquisition creates new opportunities for Cribl's channel partners, noting that observability has traditionally been a difficult market for partners to build a business in. What Cribl is building, he explained, is different: a single engine for all observability data, running on data customers own, customizable to their workflows, and ready for AI agents now working alongside engineers. That approach gives partners room to win more observability deals and deliver new services and applications on top of the platform, while customers retain the choice and control they expect from Cribl. The company's recent acquisition spree included CardinalOps in July, adding agentic detection engineering software to expand into security operations, and Radiant Security's AI-native SOC product assets in August to autonomously triage, investigate, and resolve security alerts. By consolidating observability intelligence with its telemetry platform, Cribl is betting that controlling data waste will become as critical as collecting data itself as AI agents proliferate across engineering teams.