ControlTheory launches with $5M in funding to tackle observability cost and complexity – News

Observability startup ControlTheory Inc. launched today with an announcement that it has raised $5 million in funding to launch its Observability Control Platform, which helps organizations actively manage and optimize the service’s costs, performance and adaptability.

Founded in 2024, ControlTheory is dedicated to transforming observability through the power of what it calls “controllability” — the active management of observability — to cut costs while increasing operational value. Controllability allows organizations to optimize their existing observability tools and platforms without replacing them and optimizes the full observability lifecycle through adaptive feedback loops, from code to cloud and from development to operations.

“Affordability requires controllability to first get costs under control and second to prevent future overages and spikes,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Bob Quillin. “But we believe observability should be more — it should be an enabler, not a burden. Controllability not only helps you cut observability costs but also empowers observability where it falls short today, sharpening root cause detection, unlocking new insights and improving operations with the agility to respond to change.”

ControlTheory says the new Observability Control Platform offers robust cost control by detecting usage spikes, reducing metric cardinality and intelligently filtering logs and traces. It also helps organizations avoid vendor lock-in and supports open standards for greater flexibility and cost efficiency.

For operational control, the platform improves root cause and anomaly detection by increasing signal quality and reducing noise through intelligent sampling. It also introduces observability “Meta-Metrics” to provide deeper insights into existing telemetry data.

Another feature of the platform, adaptive control, offers Elastic Telemetry Pipelines that leverage dynamic feedback loops to enforce policies, enabling continuous improvement without code changes. The pipelines automatically scale telemetry up or down for new releases and ongoing troubleshooting, ensuring observability remains responsive and efficient.

ControlTheory argues that controllability has always been an essential part of control theory and that by adding cost controls and feedback loops to existing observability solutions, a true control system can emerge that rebalances observability with true controllability.

The seed funding came from Austin, Texas-based venture capital firm Silverton Partners. “ControlTheory is pushing the boundaries of observability by introducing the crucial concept of Controllability, which empowers businesses to immediately manage costs, optimize performance and position themselves for the AI-enabled future,” said Kip McClanahan, a general partner at Silverton.

Image: ControlTheory