Groundcover picks up Kubernetes optimization startup Wand in its first acquisition

Groundcover Inc. has made its first acquisition, buying Kubernetes resource optimization startup Wand Cloud Ltd. for an undisclosed amount. Wand’s founders and employees are joining groundcover as part of the deal. The purchase supports groundcover’s effort to build what it calls autonomous infrastructure, in which software takes action directly on production systems.

Groundcover’s platform gathers telemetry from applications and infrastructure. Under a bring-your-own-cloud model, the resulting production history remains inside each customer’s own cloud account. Engineers and artificial intelligence agents use that data to investigate problems and determine what changed. Wand’s technology adds the ability to make and carry out decisions about live Kubernetes clusters based on how workloads actually behave.

Wand addresses the processor and memory requests Kubernetes asks engineers to set in advance, usually before a workload has run under real load. Overestimating multiplies wasted capacity across every replica and node, while setting a request too low risks throttling and outages when traffic shifts. Even a correct setting can drift out of date as services change.

Kubernetes autoscalers already handle parts of that work, but according to groundcover, the vertical, horizontal and cluster-level versions typically run independently. A tighter resource request can push measured utilization up, prompting the horizontal autoscaler to add replicas that are not needed. Workload packing on nodes then shifts, changing the cluster autoscaler’s behavior as well. Wand’s software sits inside the cluster and makes all three kinds of scaling decisions at once, so engineers are not left with a queue of right-sizing recommendations. CPU and memory allocations change on live infrastructure as demand moves. Wand said it tunes a cluster for performance and availability first, with cost savings following once unneeded headroom is removed.

Shon Lev-Ran, Wand’s co-founder and chief executive, said right-sizing assumes knowledge of the future. Infrastructure changes continuously, he said, and joining groundcover gives Wand a deeper view of production activity. Groundcover argues that a workload can appear overprovisioned based on the past hour yet still be sized correctly for traffic that arrives every Monday morning. The company said it keeps production data at high fidelity so teams do not have to decide in advance what to sample or discard.

Groundcover co-founder and Chief Executive Shahar Azulay said production data is increasingly the context AI agents rely on to build, fix and run software. For infrastructure to become autonomous, he said, systems also need to act safely on what they know, and Wand has spent years building that capability for Kubernetes. Groundcover plans to use Wand’s technology in two places: its own platform, which runs inside customer cloud accounts, where a leaner footprint should make it cheaper for customers to retain full-fidelity telemetry, and directly in the hands of groundcover customers. No timeline was given.

Groundcover has raised $160 million to date, including a $100 million Series C round led by One Peak in July. Other investors include Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, Zeev Ventures, Angular Ventures, Heavybit and Jibe. The acquisition extends a consolidation trend in the US Kubernetes and cloud observability market, where vendors are pairing telemetry with automated action on production infrastructure.

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