Aparna and I started Arize 6+ years ago with a simple proposition that headlined our seed deck:
“We Make the World’s AI Work”
Today we are announcing the signing of a definitive agreement for the acquisition of Arize by Dynatrace to accelerate that proposition.
We made a bet years ago that the explosion of AI would require bespoke infra tools. We knew AI systems weren’t going to behave like traditional software because we were building systems approaching human-level reasoning, the next generation of intelligence. The visibility into why something failed simply wasn’t going to be as straightforward or as consistent.
That bet became the market’s first AI Observability platform, and with it, AI evaluations were born. We also bet that orders of magnitude more AI products would ship and that thousands of them would see the light of production. We believed so deeply in the importance of this problem we named the company Arize, symbolizing our mission to stand up AI and bring it to life in the real world.
Fast forward to 2026. The world has changed dramatically. Every company in the world is scaling up its use of agents, AI is everywhere and agents are reshaping business after business.
What wasn’t clear years ago and is crystal clear today is that agent systems and software are joined at the hip.
- The best general agents are coding agents.
- Skills and tools for agents are mixtures of prompts and code.
- Prompts that control agents live in the code repo.
- The logs and traces used to debug your software also help you debug your AI systems.
- The path to AGI is likely through coding agents.
AI and software systems are deeply connected together in ways that none of us fathomed.
Where is AI going?
Agents are transforming the Observability market from measurement to action.
We are moving to a world where AI and software systems will continually improve autonomously. The foundation for continuous improvement is the data that describes what your system did – logs and traces – which will guide agents as they take action to fix systems.
The markets for Observability and AI Observability are converging.
- For agents to continuously improve systems, software will need to trace 100x more data than today. For this to work, every inch of software needs to be logged for agents to truly make continuous fixes.
- AI Observability is transforming measurement into action by adding long running agents to fix your systems (Arize Signal and Arize Managed Agents). All of these agents are driven by data from Observability infrastructure.
Arize was built as an agent-first platform, with one of the largest collections of agent trace data in the industry. Dynatrace brings depth in tracing and logging software systems that provide the data to drive these agents. These two areas just belong together if we are going to build the future systems that continuously improve.
Some thank you’s
Before I talk about what’s next, some thank you’s.
To the Arize team. Startups are hard in normal markets. We built infrastructure for a market that kept changing under our feet, and this team kept listening to customers, kept shipping, and kept believing. You turned an idea into the category leader. I could not be prouder of you.
To Aparna. For six years we have worked on this product nonstop, through every stage of company-building and life. You never slowed down and never stopped raising the bar. There is no Arize without Aparna. I couldn’t have built this with anyone else.
To our customers, who have trusted us with their most important AI systems before this category existed. You have made the product better every single day.
To our investors, advisors, and early believers who backed us when AI observability was not a budget line or even a real category yet. Thank you investors and board – Brett Wilson (Swift Ventures), Ashu Garg (Foundation Capital), Dharmesh Thakker (Battery), Morgan Gerlak (TCV), and John Cordo (Evolution).
Jason Mendel and Jaya Gupta have been instrumental in our journey in so many ways. These folks behind the scenes help so many companies in so many ways.
And to the open source community around Phoenix and OpenInference. Developer trust and open standards are the foundation this category gets built on.
I keep thinking back to the beginning. Arize started as an InVision prototype and a small group of people who believed AI was going to need this before the market did. No category, no budget lines, no playbook. Just a demo and a conviction that production AI was coming and somebody had to make it work. Most of those people are still here. That’s the part I’m proudest of.
Where does the industry go
There will be a time very soon where a single business will run more than a million agents. The challenge for that business will be making sure those agents are making the correct decisions, operating securely and not doing anything you don’t want them to do.
That is why we exist.
Our internal “full” mission statement since the founding has been:
“We Make the World’s AI Work and Work for The ‘People”
The “Work for the People” has meant a number of things over the years. But today, as we look at this industry on the edge of a new era, “for the people” clearly means the safety and security of agents.
Arize collects billions of agent trajectory events and we have a unique view into agents’ actions. Dynatrace tracks everything your software does. Making AI work and making it work securely requires many things each company uniquely does today.
The power of connecting Arize and Dynatrace is the potential to truly deliver on the vision we started the company with years ago. Excited for the next chapter!