Metaplane

Metaplane is an end-to-end data observability platform that monitors data flowing through a company's data stack and alerts teams when something appears to be going wrong. The product collects metrics, metadata, lineage, and logs, trains anomaly detection models on historical values, and sends alerts on outliers, with the ability for users to provide feedback to the models. Core capabilities marketed on the company site include no-code monitoring from source to BI, end-to-end column-level lineage with no manual setup, data usage insights intended to reduce data debt, Data CI/CD (automated regression and impact tests on pull requests, supporting GitHub and GitLab plus dbt Core and dbt Cloud), and targeted automated alerts.

Monitors check numeric values against a predicted range and open a data incident when the value falls outside that range. Values can be sourced from warehouse metadata (row counts, last-updated timestamps, column counts), direct table queries using aggregate functions with optional GROUP BY, or values pushed through an Ingest Datapoint API endpoint. The company positions machine-learning monitors as more adaptable than static tests because ranges account for seasonality and trends, and as a way to reduce alert noise at scale, support proactive detection, and aid root-cause investigation when multiple monitors are deployed on related tables.

Metaplane emphasizes fast time-to-value: connect a warehouse and see anomaly detection within roughly 10-15 minutes of setup, with models typically requiring several days to a week of observations before sending alerts. The company also publishes free standalone tools (dbt Alerting for Slack and Microsoft Teams, the open-source dbt Inspector, and a schema change tracker) and offers a Snowflake native app that runs monitors inside the customer's Snowflake environment and can be paid for with existing Snowflake credits.

Founding story

The company was founded in 2019 by Kevin Hu, Guru Mahendran, and Peter Casinelli to provide instant visibility into data quality issues that negatively impact businesses, in a context where data pipelines involve hundreds of sources, complex business logic, and many cross-functional stakeholders [6][7]. Kevin Hu serves as CEO and co-founder [6].

Business model

Software-as-a-service sold on a usage-based model in which customers monitor and pay only for selected tables rather than an entire warehouse, with optional add-ons and annual enterprise contracts offering volume discounts. A free-forever tier is available with no credit card required, and a Snowflake native app allows payment via existing Snowflake credits [0][1].

Subscription and usage-based pricing that scales up and down with usage, with add-ons, free plans, and annual enterprise contracts [0][1]. The March 2024 funding announcement referenced revenue growth in 2023 without disclosing figures [6].

Traction

As of the March 2024 Series A, Metaplane's customer base had tripled during 2023 to over 100 companies, including Klaviyo, Sigma, Census, GoFundMe, Bose, Ramp, and ClickUp [6][7]. As of January 2024, customers had run more than 500 million data quality checks across over 40 million data assets and over 30 million data lineage connections, tripled the number of monitors created, and detected and resolved over 80,000 incidents [6]. The company reported 45 product releases in 2023 and an average setup time of 15 minutes [2].

Latest developments

Metaplane's website and documentation display a banner announcing that Metaplane and Datadog have joined forces to bring software and data observability together, with the site branded "Metaplane by Datadog"; no financial terms or completion date are disclosed in the sources [0][1][2][3]. The most recent dated milestone in the sources is the March 2024 Series A [6][7].