highlight.io

Jay Khatri and Vadim Korolik created Highlight after building improvised combinations of session replay and error monitoring at prior companies and concluding that developers lacked enough context to reproduce production bugs. The Seattle-based company began with a lightweight frontend SDK that captured a user's screen, console/network activity and errors, then linked client behavior with backend exceptions. It expanded into an open-source, OpenTelemetry-oriented full-stack observability distribution spanning session replay, error monitoring, logs, distributed traces, metrics/APM, dashboards and alerts. The stack used ClickHouse for high-volume event storage/query, language/framework SDKs, privacy controls and a self-hosted enterprise option. Highlight open-sourced the company/product in 2023 and built a product-led developer community; at its YC launch it reported 2,000+ production developers and 80+ companies, while its August 2023 financing announcement reported hundreds of customers, roughly 1,000 Discord members and 5,000+ GitHub stars. It raised $500k through YC W23 and then an $8m seed co-led by Afore Capital and Craft Ventures, bringing modeled disclosed funding to $8.5m. Seed participants included YC, Neo, Day One Ventures, Worklife Ventures and Fuel Capital, plus angels. LaunchDarkly acquired Highlight in April 2025 for undisclosed terms, bringing the full team and co-founders into its platform organization. The strategic thesis was to join real-time observability with feature flags and Guarded Releases: control who sees a rollout, observe errors/logs/traces/session behavior, and roll back quickly. LaunchDarkly subsequently reproduced Highlight's features in LaunchDarkly Observability; customers were instructed to change SDK snippets and plans before Highlight.io's hosted services ended on February 28, 2026. The open-source repository remains relevant, but the standalone commercial service no longer operates. Historical pricing ranged from a free tier through $50/month pay-as-you-go and $800/month Business, with enterprise/self-hosted contracts. Primary risks included extremely intense competition (Datadog, Sentry, Grafana, New Relic, Honeycomb, FullStory/LogRocket), high ingest/storage costs, sensitive session data and privacy compliance, reliability at observability scale, open-source monetization and customer migration after acquisition.

Founding story

Khatri and Korolik had separately used homegrown replay/error tooling to debug production behavior. They started Highlight to unify the 'why' behind errors—user interactions, network requests, console output and backend context—rather than add another noisy alert stream.

Business model

Open-core/full-stack observability platform offered as hosted usage-based SaaS plus self-hosted enterprise software.

Free developer tier, monthly platform fees plus usage/retention overages, Business subscription, negotiated Enterprise MSAs/SLAs and self-hosted enterprise contracts.

Traction

YC launch: 2,000+ developers using Highlight in production and 80+ companies. August 2023: hundreds of customers ranging from 2 to 2,000 employees, ~1,000 Discord members and 5,000+ GitHub stars. Historical customer logos included Pipe, Portal, Dripos, Knock, Hightouch, Basedash, Blue Cross of Idaho, Mage, Airplane, Secoda, Whop and Aurora.

Latest developments

All core Highlight features became available in LaunchDarkly Observability. Standalone Highlight.io infrastructure and services ended on February 28, 2026; self-service and enterprise customers were migrated to LaunchDarkly accounts, SDK snippets and commercial terms.