CubeAPM, an Indian startup founded by experienced tech leaders, aims to disrupt the observability market dominated by Datadog and New Relic by providing an AI-enhanced monitoring platform that reduces costs by up to 80%, while ensuring data stays within customer cloud environments.
- Offers 60-80% cost savings vs. established monitoring platforms
- Self-hosted model enhances data residency and compliance
- Uses AI-driven troubleshooting to improve operational insights
What happened
CubeAPM was founded by Vineet Chirania and Vijay Aggarwal, who encountered significant challenges with high and unpredictable costs while using major observability platforms at their previous startups. Their experience with Datadog and New Relic revealed critical pain points, especially relating to billing spikes and limitations in data residency that affected compliance and performance.
Leveraging this shared insight, they developed CubeAPM to provide an alternative that installs directly within enterprise cloud infrastructures. This model helps maintain control over telemetry data while dramatically lowering costs. Currently, CubeAPM has around 50 enterprise customers including notable Indian companies such as Delhivery, RedBus, and Ola Group and reports a nearly $1.5 million annual recurring revenue, growing profitably since inception.
Why it matters
Observability is critical for modern software operations, helping teams quickly detect and resolve application issues using telemetry data such as logs and metrics. However, traditional SaaS-based observability tools often become prohibitively expensive as usage scales, with costs rising unpredictably and data being sent to vendor clouds, raising security and compliance concerns.
CubeAPM addresses these challenges by offering a self-hosted, on-premises solution with AI-assisted diagnostics. This architecture not only reduces operational expenses by up to 80% but also meets the stringent data residency requirements of enterprises. Its approach presents a compelling alternative for companies hesitant to migrate critical monitoring away from incumbent platforms without a significant cost or compliance advantage.
What to watch next
CubeAPM’s future growth will depend on its ability to convince established enterprises to shift from entrenched vendors like Datadog and New Relic, which requires demonstrating substantial ROI and seamless migrations. The company’s targeting of cost-conscious Indian firms and scaling profits indicate early traction, but global market penetration presents a formidable challenge.
Additionally, as AI-driven observability evolves, CubeAPM’s innovation in integrating automated troubleshooting could become a key differentiator. Observers should watch how the startup expands its product capabilities and scales its client base within the rapidly growing global observability market, expected to reach $20 billion by 2031.