Sawmills

What Sawmills does

Sawmills is an agentic telemetry management platform purpose-built to reduce observability costs and improve telemetry data quality for DevOps-led engineering organizations. Its core product, Mills, is an AI-powered autonomous operator that continuously analyzes, optimizes, and manages telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) in real time, applying DevOps-defined policies for routing, filtering, enrichment, sampling, redaction, and dropping before the data reaches expensive downstream observability platforms such as Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, Elastic, and OpenSearch. The architecture is OpenTelemetry-native and comprises the Sawmills Collector (data plane based on the OpenTelemetry Collector), the Sawmills Remote Operator (control plane for managing collector configuration and health), the Sawmills CLI for command-line management, and a hosted MCP server that connects the platform to AI coding agents such as Codex and Claude Code.

The company sells through a hybrid product-led growth and enterprise field sales motion, offering a free trial and self-service onboarding alongside scheduled demos targeting CTOs and DevOps leaders at mid-market and enterprise companies. Pricing is quote-based SaaS subscription, not publicly disclosed, and the company maintains a freemium Datadog cost-analysis tool as a top-of-funnel acquisition channel. Reported customer outcomes include a 63% reduction in observability spend and a 93% reduction in data ingest at BigPanda, and Via has cited streamlined cost, resource allocation, and governance as outcomes. Sawmills is incorporated in Delaware with a Los Altos, California headquarters, was founded in 2024, raised a $10 million seed round in February 2025 led by Team8 with participation from Mayfield, Alumni Ventures, and Operator Partners, achieved SOC 2 Type II certification, and was named to Calcalist's 50 Most Promising Israeli Startups 2026 list, reflecting its Israeli founder and R&D heritage.

Name

Sawmills

Legal name

Sawmills.AI Inc.

Website

https://sawmills.ai

Company type

Private

Founded year

2024

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

Sawmills is an agentic telemetry management platform that autonomously optimizes logs, metrics, and traces for DevOps and engineering teams, reducing observability costs and improving data quality before data reaches Datadog, Splunk, or New Relic.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Observability & Telemetry Management Software

NAICS

Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (518210)

SIC

Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc. (7370)

akta.pro primary industry

Data Observability & Warehouse Monitoring (HDAEABAK)

Keywords

• Telemetry management
• Observability cost optimization
• OpenTelemetry platform
• Agentic AI operations
• Log data reduction

Headquarters

HQ city

San Francisco

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales, Operations

Revenue model

1. SaaS Subscription: Subscription-based SaaS model where customers pay subscription fees for access to the Sawmills platform. Fees are invoiced in advance, stated in US Dollars, with the initial subscription term specified in Order Forms.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion2 records

Distribution channels4 records

Marketing channels6 records

Core offering

Sawmills offers an agentic telemetry management platform centered on its product "Mills" that continuously analyzes, optimizes, and governs telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces) before it reaches downstream observability platforms. The platform is built on OpenTelemetry standards and uses AI to filter, sample, transform, route, enrich, redact, and drop telemetry in real time, targeting cost reduction (60-80%), data quality improvement, and prevention of observability outages. It consists of the Sawmills Collector, Remote Operator control plane, CLI, and an MCP server for AI coding agent integration.

Product overview

Sawmills is an agentic telemetry management platform that helps teams cut observability costs and improve telemetry quality. The core product is Mills, an AI-powered agentic telemetry operator that continuously analyzes, optimizes, and manages telemetry data across its lifecycle. The platform is built on OpenTelemetry standards and consists of the Sawmills Collector (for gathering, processing, and exporting telemetry), the Sawmills Remote Operator (control plane for managing collector configuration), the Sawmills CLI for command-line management, and the Sawmills MCP Server for AI coding agent integration. The platform supports logs and metrics with traces coming soon, and integrates with observability destinations including Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, Elasticsearch, and OpenSearch.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Mills The world's first agentic telemetry management platform that continuously coordinates the creation, optimization, and ongoing management of telemetry data. Mills acts as an autonomous operator that analyzes telemetry flows, applies DevOps-defined policies, and makes real-time recommendations for routing, filtering, enrichment, and data dropping before data reaches observability platforms. For DevOps leaders and developers at mid-market and enterprise companies with complex observability needs.
• Sawmills Collector Central component of Sawmills, based on OpenTelemetry's Collector, responsible for gathering, processing, and exporting telemetry logs, metrics, and traces. Vendor-agnostic and scalable with custom processing capabilities. Decouples generation and analysis of observability data, enabling teams to manage data collection, transformation, and forwarding.
• Sawmills Remote Operator Control plane component that manages Collector behavior in the field. Coordinates configuration deployments, reports on collector health, and accesses live data streams for centralized management of distributed collectors.
• Sawmills CLI (sm) Command-line interface binary shipped by Sawmills for managing collectors and pipelines. Installable via Homebrew on macOS and Linux. Supports JSON output, debug mode, and browser-based OAuth PKCE authentication for developer self-service.
• Sawmills MCP Server

Quantifiable outcome

• Reduce observability spend by 60-80%
• +5 more outcomes

Named customers2 records

Segments4 records

Ideal customer profiles2 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration12 records

AI capability6 records

Feature12 records

Partnerships

16 partnerships are on record, tiered core integration, infrastructure and strategic.

• Datadogcore integrationTechnology or IntegrationNative integration with Datadog for metrics usage features, Datadog cost analysis, and log/metrics forwarding. Supports Datadog Agent, Datadog Serverless Forwarder for AWS Lambda, and Datadog Logs Rehydration pattern compatibility.
• Splunkcore integrationTechnology or IntegrationIntegration with Splunk via Splunk HEC destination and S3 rehydration. Supports Splunk Add-on for AWS Generic S3 input for log rehydration from archives.
• New Reliccore integrationTechnology or IntegrationNative integration with New Relic for metrics usage features. Supports New Relic dedicated service account configuration with read-only access and permission validation.
• GitHubcore integrationTechnology or IntegrationGitHub App integration for connecting repositories to Sawmills Telemetry Reviewer. Analyzes telemetry changes in pull requests with permissions for contents read, pull requests write, issues write, checks read, and statuses read.
• GitLabcore integrationTechnology or IntegrationGitLab integration connecting projects or groups to Sawmills Telemetry Reviewer. Supports webhook-based merge request analysis with maintainer-level access and API read/write operations.
• Slackcore integrationTechnology or IntegrationSlack integration for receiving Insight notifications and automated action updates directly in team Slack channels. Enables developer self-service telemetry tuning within Slack.
• Microsoft Teamscore integrationTechnology or IntegrationMicrosoft Teams integration for receiving Insight notifications and automated action updates. Alternative to Slack for team collaboration on telemetry management.
• AWS S3core integrationTechnology or IntegrationAWS S3 destination for archiving logs with hourly partitioning in NDJSON/gzip format. Supports rehydration to Splunk, OpenSearch, and other destinations with customer-owned S3 buckets.
• VictoriaLogscore integrationTechnology or IntegrationNative support for VictoriaLogs via OTLP HTTP destination. Supports both managed VictoriaLogs Cloud and self-hosted deployments with multi-tenancy via AccountID/ProjectID headers.
• OpenSearchcore integrationTechnology or IntegrationOpenSearch integration for log rehydration from S3 archives. Supports Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion and self-managed OpenSearch Data Prepper pipelines.
• Vectorcore integrationTechnology or IntegrationIntegration with Vector log tool using OTLP source in Sawmills and opentelemetry sink in Vector. Supports both single-shipping and dual-shipping configurations.
• AWSinfrastructureTechnology or IntegrationAWS used as primary cloud infrastructure provider for hosting. Sawmills stores customer data with AWS according to privacy policy.
• OpenTelemetrycore integrationTechnology or IntegrationBuilt on OpenTelemetry standards with native support for OpenTelemetry Collector, OTLP protocol, and OpenTelemetry data model for logs, metrics, and traces.
• CodexstrategicTechnology or IntegrationAI coding agent integration via Sawmills MCP server, enabling AI-assisted telemetry management and pipeline configuration through Codex.
• Claude CodestrategicTechnology or IntegrationAI coding agent integration via Sawmills MCP server, enabling AI-assisted telemetry management and pipeline configuration through Claude Code.
• OpenAIinfrastructureTechnology or IntegrationSAML SSO support for enterprise identity management. Support for OKTA Workforce identity provider.

Scale indicators5 records

Recent moves8 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Direct peers

• Cribl: Cribl Stream is the most direct competitor to Sawmills — a telemetry pipeline management platform that routes, filters, and reshapes observability data before it reaches backends like Splunk, Datadog, and New Relic. Both companies target the same DevOps/observability cost-optimization use case and overlap directly on OpenTelemetry-based pipelines and routing logic.
• Mezmo: Mezmo (formerly LogDNA) is a telemetry data management platform focused on routing, enriching, and reducing log data at scale. It competes with Sawmills on pre-ingestion log optimization and observability cost reduction, with overlapping customers in DevOps and SRE teams.
• Chronosphere: Chronosphere is a cloud-native observability platform built on M3DB that emphasizes cardinality control and cost-efficient telemetry storage — directly attacking the same observability cost problem that Sawmills addresses via filtering and sampling upstream.

Broad incumbents

• Datadog: Datadog is a leading broad observability platform that Sawmills integrates with and whose high costs motivate Sawmills' value proposition. Datadog could natively build competing telemetry-optimization features, making it both a partner and an indirect competitive threat.
• Splunk: Splunk is a broad incumbent in log analytics and observability and a named Sawmills integration partner. Its ingestion-based pricing is the prototypical cost problem Sawmills solves, and Splunk Cloud / Splunk Observability are adjacent enterprise platforms that could absorb optimization natively.
• New Relic: New Relic is a broad observability and APM platform and a Sawmills integration partner. Its pricing model (data ingest / GB) is one of the cost structures Sawmills aims to optimize, positioning it as both a partner and a potential competitive incumbent.
• Grafana Labs: Grafana Labs builds the open-source Grafana LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir) and offers enterprise observability. Its open-source-first approach and broad platform overlap make it a relevant adjacent incumbent Sawmills customers may already use.

Emerging players

• Vector (Datadog): Vector is a popular open-source observability data pipeline tool (now under Datadog) that performs routing, transformation, and filtering on logs and metrics — directly comparable to Sawmills' Collector and pipelines. It is referenced as a Sawmills integration and represents open-source competition.
• observIQ: observIQ (now part of the Bindplane family) provides OpenTelemetry-based log routing, filtering, and forwarding — closely aligned with Sawmills' Collector-based pre-ingestion pipeline approach and overlapping in target customer (DevOps / platform engineering).
• Logz.io: Logz.io offers an observability platform built on the OpenTelemetry stack with cost-management positioning. It overlaps with Sawmills on telemetry cost reduction and targets similar mid-market and enterprise DevOps buyers.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses4 records

Competitive moat5 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/SawmillsAI
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/sawmills

Compliance1 record

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles3 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds1 record

Investors4 records

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Sawmills