Pixielabs

Pixielabs AI operates as a specialized machine intelligence tool provider for software developers navigating the complexities of Kubernetes environments. The company was established in 2018 in San Francisco by Zain Asgar and Ishan Mukherjee. The founders brought together extensive experience from the artificial intelligence and machine learning sectors. Asgar, the CEO, previously worked at Google AI, Trifacta, and Nvidia, and holds a PhD from Stanford, where he also serves as an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science. Mukherjee, the CPO, has a background that includes leading Apple's Siri Knowledge Graph product team and early engineering work at Amazon Robotics. Their collective frustration with the manual and inefficient processes of monitoring distributed software applications fueled the creation of Pixielabs.

The firm's core product, Pixie, is an observability platform designed to give developers instant visibility into their applications running on Kubernetes. A key differentiator of Pixie is its ability to automatically collect telemetry data—such as metrics, traces, logs, and events—without requiring developers to manually insert instrumentation code into their applications. This is achieved by leveraging technologies like eBPF, which allows the platform to gather data directly from the operating system kernel. The platform operates entirely within the user's own Kubernetes cluster, ensuring that sensitive data does not need to be transferred to an external environment, which addresses both latency and security concerns. The business model initially centered on providing this advanced monitoring solution to a range of clients, from startups to large enterprises, with some early customers signing multi-year, six-figure contracts.

A significant milestone in the company's history was its emergence from stealth in October 2020 with a $9.15 million Series A funding round led by Benchmark and with participation from GV. This event highlighted the market's validation of Pixie's approach to simplifying Kubernetes observability. Shortly thereafter, in a strategic move that underscored the value of its technology, Pixie Labs was acquired by New Relic in December 2020, just two months after its public launch. Following the acquisition, New Relic announced plans to open-source the Pixie platform and contribute it to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), making the technology more accessible to the broader developer community. This integration aimed to combine Pixie's powerful data collection with New Relic's broader observability and analytics capabilities.

Keywords: Kubernetes observability, application performance monitoring, eBPF, machine intelligence, developer tools, telemetry data, no-code instrumentation, live debugging, cloud-native monitoring, Kubernetes monitoring, New Relic, Zain Asgar, Ishan Mukherjee, CNCF, open source observability, application troubleshooting, service health management, in-cluster data, distributed systems monitoring, automated telemetry