Background: Two Aussie founders, Martin Mao and Rob Skillington, jumped to the US after uni in 2010 because the local tech scene didn’t offer many high-paying roles back. While at Uber, they built a system capable of tracking millions of riders and drivers in real time - basically the world’s most sophisticated “stalker tool.” In 2019, they left their jobs to launch Chronosphere, an observability platform that helps huge companies monitor their systems in real time.

What happened: Chronosphere took off fast, landing clients like Snap, Walmart, Doordash and CommBank. Earlier this year, the company hit $160 million USD in annualised revenue. And now? Palo Alto Networks has swooped in and acquired Chronosphere for a massive $3.3 billion USD.

What else: With recent outages at AWS and Cloudflare knocking major apps offline, observability tools are becoming even more valuable. Companies need platforms like Chronosphere to spot problems early - before half the internet disappears.

What's the key learning?

💡In the AI and cloud boom, the biggest winners aren’t the headline apps... they’re the behind-the-scenes “picks and shovels” that keep everything running.

💡Cloud outages can be crazy expensive and massively disruptive - which is why real-time monitoring tools have become mission-critical infrastructure. In fact, it’s believed that 20% of the entire internet went down when Cloudflare had an outage earlier this year.

💡As the digital world grows more complex, observability platforms are turning into essential safety nets that help providers detect issues early and prevent internet-wide chaos.