ControlTheory raised $5 million in seed funding from Silverton Partners, an Austin-based venture capital firm. 

This milestone supports the launch of its innovative Observability Control Platform, enabling technology leaders to regain control of their observability through cost control, operational control, and adaptive control.

ControlTheory introduced 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. Unlike static, one-way telemetry pipelines, controllability optimizes the full observability lifecycle through adaptive feedback loops, from code to cloud, and development to operations.

“Observability cost management is a top concern for organizations today,” said Bob Quillin, CEO and co-founder of ControlTheory. "Affordability requires controllability to first get costs under control and second to prevent future overages and spikes. 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’s Observability Control Platform delivers:

• Cost Control: Detecting spikes, reducing metric cardinality, intelligently rerouting and filtering logs and traces, avoiding vendor lock-in, using open standards.
• Operational Control: Sharpening root cause and anomaly detections by increasing signal, decreasing noise through intelligent sampling, illuminating current telemetry through observability “Meta-Metrics.”
• Adaptive Control: Elastic Telemetry Pipelines use dynamic feedback loops to govern through policy for continuous improvement and adjustment, auto-scaling telemetry up or down for new releases and iterative troubleshooting without having to change your code.  

Powered by OpenTelemetry, ControlTheory integrates with any existing instrumentation and observability tools, future-proofing control and avoiding vendor lock-in.

“Increasingly complex systems and ballooning telemetry volumes have made observability costs and processes an operational challenge for many organizations, with innovative technologies and AI workloads introducing more cost and complexity to the mix,” said Kelly Fitzpatrick, Senior Analyst at RedMonk. “Concepts like controllability aim to address these issues and necessarily evolve how we think about observability by focusing on actively governing, shaping, and optimizing telemetry rather than just collecting it.”

“Observability costs and the value they provide are receiving more scrutiny than ever, as they now represent a significant portion of most organizations’ cloud budgets,” according to Kip McClanahan, General Partner at Silverton Partners. “We’re thrilled to partner once again with the ControlTheory founding team as they tackle these pressing challenges head-on: driving down the cost of observability while enhancing business oversight and understanding. 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.”

Controllability has always been an essential part of control theory. By adding cost controls and feedback loops to existing observability solutions, a true control system can emerge that rebalances observability with true controllability. The ControlTheory Observability Control Platform doesn’t just collect, pipeline, and store data — it actively controls, refines, and optimizes observability in real-time.

ControlTheory is not priced by telemetry volume or ingest. Instead, it is based on control layer components such as control planes and agents. 

ControlTheory’s Observability Control Platform is now available for early access.