Dash0 Acquires Polar Signals, Adding GPU-Aware Continuous Profiling to Its Observability Platform
Dash0 buys Berlin's Polar Signals to bring CUDA-aware continuous profiling and a new storage engine into its OpenTelemetry-native observability platform.
Overview
Observability startup Dash0 has acquired Berlin-based continuous profiling specialist Polar Signals, according to DevOps.com. The deal folds continuous profiling into SignalStore, Dash0’s OpenTelemetry-native data platform, and gives the company a profiling capability aimed squarely at GPU-heavy AI workloads.
What We Know
Continuous profiling shows engineering teams an ongoing view of where a running application spends CPU time, allocates memory, and consumes other resources, and many observability platforms already offer some version of it, DevOps.com reports. Polar Signals’ distinguishing feature is continuous profiling of Nvidia CUDA workloads in production — a capability DevOps.com describes as “a less common capability.” Dash0 says the technology can profile both AI training and inference workloads with visibility down to individual GPU kernels, helping teams monitor resource consumption and pinpoint performance problems, according to DevOps.com.
Dash0 plans to integrate Polar Signals’ profiling data into SignalStore and feed it into Agent0, its AI agent for production operations, which can already correlate telemetry with source code and prepare pull requests for fixes, per DevOps.com. Profiling data becomes another source of runtime evidence Agent0 can draw on when deciding what changes to propose, and Dash0 will also expose the profiling data to external coding agents through its MCP server, giving them additional runtime context, DevOps.com reports.
The company is also building AutoTune, an Agent0 capability that will analyze profiling data on a schedule and look for opportunities to improve CPU and memory use, according to DevOps.com. When AutoTune identifies an optimization, it is designed to open a pull request with the proposed change and the profiling evidence behind it — but Dash0 said the system will not merge those changes on its own, leaving developers to review and decide whether to accept them, per DevOps.com.
The acquisition traces back to a dinner conversation in Berlin between Dash0 CEO Mirko Novakovic and Polar Signals founder Frederic Branczyk, DevOps.com reports. Branczyk wrote that Novakovic described the cost, performance, and operational challenges Dash0 was having with ClickHouse, while Polar Signals had already built several iterations of a database for similar workloads; as they talked, it became clear the two companies had been “working toward the same thing from opposite ends,” Branczyk said, according to DevOps.com.
That overlap explains why the deal goes beyond profiling software. Dash0 is also acquiring Polar Signals’ Great Lakes storage engine, built to handle the high-cardinality data that profiling generates, along with the Polar Signals engineering team, per DevOps.com. Branczyk said Dash0 eventually plans to replace ClickHouse beneath SignalStore with Great Lakes, with the goal of storing metrics, logs, traces, and profiles in the same engine, DevOps.com reports. The deal also includes Parca, Polar Signals’ open source continuous profiling project, which the company said will remain open source and continue to be maintained, per DevOps.com.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, according to DevOps.com. Dash0 was founded in 2023 and raised $110 million at a $1 billion valuation in a Series B round led by Balderton Capital, as previously reported. Dash0 said at the time it would use some of the funding to pursue strategic acquisitions, and the company now has more than 750 customers, DevOps.com reports.
The deal also builds on Dash0’s OpenTelemetry-based architecture. OpenTelemetry Profiles, the project’s profiling specification, entered public alpha in March, extending the OpenTelemetry data model to include profiles alongside traces, metrics, and logs, and Polar Signals has contributed to that work — bringing Dash0 a team already involved in shaping OpenTelemetry’s emerging profiling standard, according to DevOps.com.
What We Don’t Know
The purchase price of the Polar Signals acquisition has not been disclosed. Timelines for shipping the Great Lakes migration, the AutoTune feature, or the broader profiling integration into SignalStore have not been specified.