Tsuga
AI-scale observability that lives in your cloud
Hey People!
Welcome back to Forests Over Trees, the tech newsletter where we zoom out, connect dots, and (try to) predict the future.
In case you missed it last time, we’re pivoting to focus on startups. We’ll meet founders inventing the future, dissect their strategies, and explain why what they’re doing matters.
If you want to nominate a startup to be featured (I’m looking at you, founders and investors), do that here.
A quick thank you to this week’s partners:
Motion — free up time with an AI executive assistant
Glide — easily create custom, no-code apps
Deel — a one-stop shop for hiring, payroll, and compliance
And now, let’s meet our featured startup for this week.
Tsuga
AI-scale observability that lives in your cloud
🚩 Problem
Software creates tons of data (“telemetry”), and companies troubleshoot issues and optimize performance by storing and analyzing it (“observability”).
Existing tools like Datadog require sending telemetry out of the customer’s cloud, paying steep markups, and losing control of retention and access.
Leaving the customer’s cloud creates compliance headaches — especially in Europe — where data residency is a major concern.
AI is exploding observability costs by creating more telemetry, so some companies are intentionally ignoring or discarding data, creating blind spots.
💡 Solution
Tsuga provides a Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (BYOC) observability experience that runs inside the customer’s AWS, GCP, or Azure accounts.
With BYOC, customers can analyze telemetry locally, avoid data transfer charges, minimize compliance risks, and use standard cloud access and retention policies.
Because Tsuga lowers costs and avoids data transfers, customers can maximize collection and fill in blind spots, even with the ramp-up in telemetry from AI.
👥 Team
Leadership:
Gabriel-James Safar — Co-founder & CEO; former Senior Director of Product at Datadog; previously co-founded Madumbo (acquired by Datadog).
Sébastien Deprez — Co-founder & CTO; former Senior Engineering Manager at Datadog; co-founded Madumbo with Safar.
HQ: Paris
Funding: $10M seed in November 2025 from General Catalyst and Singular
⚖️ Analysis
Strengths
Founders are deep in observability (Datadog veterans), and have founded multiple companies.
BYOC is a single differentiator with several benefits, creating a real moat vs. incumbents.
Lower costs should attract early adopters and give customers immediate ROI.
Challenges
BYOC clashes with multi-cloud support — to offer multi-cloud, you need to exfiltrate data, which runs right back into compliance and cost challenges.
This isn’t for all customers — Tsuga gives them control and lowers cost, but customers may perceive higher effort.
🌲 Zooming-Out
Two things worth paying extra attention to here…
First, it’s hard to overstate how intensely cloud companies are pushing to innovate around data sovereignty, especially in Europe. Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and others have announced customized offerings to address regulator concerns, and it’s only fitting that a French cloud startup is jumping in to help (Silicon Valley doesn’t have a monopoly on bold startups!).
But second, as mentioned briefly above, BYOC is inherently incompatible with the red-hot multi-cloud story that’s also happening right now. Wiz, the multi-cloud security tool that Google bought for $32B, is one example of that… Customers want multiple clouds (for resiliency, cost optimization, etc.), and they need a single pane of glass for X (observability, security, whatever).
So while BYOC and the associated cost and control benefits are awesome differentiators in the short term, Tsuga will need to jump to the multi-cloud wave sometime soon… even if it means watering down the BYOC story.