Groundcover, a bring-your-own-cloud observability platform built on eBPF and OpenTelemetry, announced on September 24, 2026 that it has acquired Kubernetes resource optimization company Wand. The acquisition is groundcover's first, and Wand's founding team and employees will join the company. Financial terms were not disclosed, and the deal signals a move from providing production context toward enabling autonomous infrastructure action.
Strategic Rationale and Market Context
Groundcover captures high-fidelity telemetry across applications and infrastructure using eBPF and OpenTelemetry, then retains that production history inside the customer's cloud through its bring-your-own-cloud architecture. This data provides engineers and AI agents with context to investigate issues, understand changes, and determine what happened in production. Wand adds a different capability by using production behavior to continuously make and execute decisions about live Kubernetes infrastructure.
From Manual Sizing to Coordinated Automation
Kubernetes asks engineers to set CPU and memory requests in advance, often before a workload has run under real load. Over-provisioning wastes capacity across replicas and nodes, while under-provisioning risks throttling and outages when traffic shifts. Even correct configurations decay as services evolve, and existing tools often treat vertical, horizontal, and cluster scaling as separate problems.
How Wand Coordinates Kubernetes Decisions
Wand's in-cluster technology continuously analyzes workload behavior and makes vertical, horizontal, and cluster-level resource decisions together, evaluating the cluster as a whole rather than one workload at a time. Instead of generating right-sizing recommendations for engineers to implement later, Wand adjusts CPU and memory allocation on live infrastructure as demand changes. It installs as a Helm chart and optimizes for performance and availability first, with cost efficiency following from reduced headroom.
Context Quality for Autonomous Infrastructure
The quality of any autonomous system depends on the context behind its decisions, because a workload can look over-provisioned based on the last hour but correctly provisioned based on weekly patterns. Groundcover's architecture captures telemetry without requiring teams to instrument every service first and retains high-fidelity production data without forcing advance sampling decisions. The company is also extending that context beyond telemetry, connecting production data with engineering systems that hold information about code, deployments, incidents, and decisions.
Leadership Perspectives
Shahar Azulay, CEO and co-founder of groundcover, said that observability has become much more than a tool engineers use to understand what went wrong. He noted that in an AI-native software development cycle, production data becomes context that agents use to build, troubleshoot, fix, and operate software. Wand CEO Shon Lev-Ran added that joining groundcover lets the companies combine Wand's ability to act on live infrastructure with a deeper understanding of what is happening across production.
What Comes Next for Customers
Groundcover will first apply Wand's technology to make its own bring-your-own-cloud data plane more efficient and resilient, because those resources appear directly on customer cloud bills. Improving storage and processing efficiency lowers that cost and lets customers economically retain more telemetry at full fidelity. Second, groundcover will bring Wand's Kubernetes resource optimization to its customers, extending the platform from observing infrastructure toward operating it.
The acquisition combines groundcover's production context with Wand's ability to act safely on live Kubernetes infrastructure. By keeping both data and decision-making inside customer environments, the companies are aligning around a shared architectural principle as infrastructure becomes more autonomous. The integration is expected to help engineering teams reduce waste, improve reliability, and move closer to software that can understand and operate production systems.