Before Datadog went public, Cisco offered more than $7 billion to buy it. The founders said no and rang the Nasdaq bell instead. It was 2019, and companies were moving their software onto Amazon, Microsoft, and Google clouds. Their systems had become sprawling and hard to see. Datadog collected the numbers from all of it, put them on shared dashboards, and warned teams before customers noticed a problem. It was a rare New York software company in a Silicon Valley game.

Two Friends From Paris

Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc met as students at École Centrale Paris. They later spent nine years together at Wireless Generation, an education software company in New York. There they watched developers and system administrators work at cross purposes. In 2010 they started Datadog to give both groups the same view of their infrastructure. It began with monitoring for cloud servers and added application tracing in 2016, then logs and security.

Twenty-Seven Dollars and Up

Datadog priced its IPO at $27 a share on September 18, 2019, selling 24 million shares and raising $648 million. The stock rose about 37 percent on its first day on Nasdaq, and the company ended the day worth nearly $10 billion. It kept buying smaller companies, including Sqreen, Metaplane, and Eppo. By 2024 it had about 6,500 employees in 33 countries. Datadog still trades on Nasdaq as DDOG.

Cover: Hound Standing, Jean Baptiste Huet. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a watchful hound.