Congratulations to Martin Mao, Rob Skillington, and the entire Chronosphere team on today’s milestone: Palo Alto Networks has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Chronosphere.
By bringing together Chronosphere’s technology and team, with Palo Alto Networks’ scale and product breadth, together, the two companies will accelerate Martin and Rob’s vision for redefining the observability market following the close of the transaction.
I first met Martin and Rob more than six years ago, when they were just beginning to imagine a company built around the M3 open source metrics and monitoring engine. From that very first meeting, I knew I wanted to be part of their journey. They were passionate, deeply customer-oriented, and as I wrote in our original investment announcement, watching them debate technical details or talk strategy was “pure magic.”
Since then, they’ve built Chronosphere into a leader in cloud-native observability and next-generation AI resiliency solutions. What began as a metrics product quickly expanded to traces, telemetry pipelines, logging, and now AI production engineering. None of these products were easy to build, but the company invested, hired, and acquired the talent and technology years ahead of when they knew they had to launch them. Many startups get distracted by other markets or change their ICP, but Martin and Rob stayed true to their vision, and core customer focus: large born-in- the cloud companies and enterprises with cloud-native infrastructure.
While understanding your customer is essential to product-market fit, scaling to full potential requires having product–go-to-market fit as well. Chronosphere’s product and engineering teams built deep technology, and their GTM team knew how to work with customers to realize the value of Chronosphere.
Although Chronosphere was founded before the AI revolution, AI has only intensified the need for what the team built. Data matters more today than it did six years ago, and the volume, velocity, and diversity of that data continues to grow exponentially. From day one, Martin and Rob designed Chronosphere for the scale of the world’s largest cloud and mobile applications. The rise of foundation models, AI-native companies, and now agentic coding has pushed data generation to entirely new extremes. We’re entering an infrastructure supercycle: new data centers, databases, clouds, and applications, each requiring observability at a scale we’ve never seen before. Whether an application runs on a GPU, CPU, smartphone, AR/VR headset, or an emerging AI-enabled device, Chronosphere is built to monitor, manage, and support it.
Observability and security have long been intertwined. Metrics, traces, and logs are critical not only for performance and reliability but also for threat detection and response. Palo Alto Networks’ acquisition of Chronosphere will bring these disciplines together, creating a unified platform that delivers security and observability at true enterprise scale.
Startup journeys are long and hard, but success comes down to the people. Martin and Rob are two of the most high-integrity and humble founders I’ve had the privilege to work with. They are confident, yet always open to feedback and learning. Thank you, Martin and Rob, for letting me be your first investor and a part of Chronosphere’s story. The future is bright, and all of us at Greylock will continue to cheer you on.
