Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc met as undergraduates at Ecole Centrale Paris, one of France's most prestigious engineering schools, where both earned master's degrees in computer science. After graduation, they worked together for nine years at Wireless Generation, a New York-based education technology company that built data systems for K-12 teachers. Pomel served as VP of Technology, growing the development team from a handful of engineers to nearly 100, while Lê-Quôc served as Director of Operations, building the infrastructure that served more than four million students across 49 states. Pomel was also an original author of the VLC media player, the open-source multimedia framework that would become one of the most widely used video players in the world. In 2010, News Corp acquired Wireless Generation, and Pomel and Lê-Quôc found themselves at a crossroads. They had spent nearly a decade experiencing the friction between development and operations teams — developers pushing rapid releases, operations teams guarding system stability, both working with different tools and different data, often at cross-purposes. When incidents occurred, the lack of shared context meant hours of wasted time correlating information across disconnected systems. They decided to build a product that would bridge this gap. The name 'Datadog' came from an internal habit at Wireless Generation of calling database servers 'dogs.' It was quirky, memorable, and signaled a focus on data-driven reliability. They bootstrapped early development, building the first version of the platform in a New York City apartment. The initial product was a cloud infrastructure monitoring service with dashboards, alerting, and visualizations — designed specifically for the ephemeral, dynamic infrastructure that was beginning to emerge with AWS and early cloud adoption. In 2010, they launched with a seed round from NYC Seed, Contour Venture Partners, IA Ventures, and angel investors including Jerry Neumann and Alex Payne. In 2012, they raised a $6.2 million Series A co-led by Index Ventures and RTP Ventures. The product gained traction quickly among early cloud adopters who were frustrated with legacy monitoring tools that could not handle auto-scaling, containers, and microservices. In 2014, Datadog raised a $15 million Series B led by OpenView Venture Partners, followed by a $31 million Series C led by Index Ventures in 2015. The company opened its Paris R&D office in 2015, tapping into the deep technical talent in France and reflecting the founders' roots. In 2016, Datadog moved its headquarters to a full floor of the New York Times Building and announced the beta release of Application Performance Monitoring — expanding from infrastructure metrics to full-stack observability. That same year, the company raised a $94.5 million Series D led by ICONIQ Capital, one of the largest funding rounds for a New York City company that year. By 2019, Datadog had built a substantial customer base and was generating significant revenue. Cisco offered over $7 billion to acquire the company, but Pomel and Lê-Quôc rejected the offer, choosing to go public instead. On September 19, 2019, Datadog went public on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange, selling 24 million shares and raising $648 million at a valuation of $8.7 billion. The stock rose approximately 37% on the first trading day, reaching a market capitalization of nearly $10 billion. Both founders became billionaires in 2020 as the stock appreciated. The pandemic in 2020 accelerated digital transformation and cloud migration, driving massive demand for Datadog's platform as organizations shifted to remote work and cloud infrastructure. Revenue surged from $603 million in 2019 to $1.03 billion in 2020. The company continued to expand its platform, launching Cloud Security Management in 2020, acquiring Sqreen for application security in 2021, and building out Cloud SIEM capabilities through 2022–2024. The 2023 launch of Bits AI at DASH marked the beginning of Datadog's generative AI transformation. Powered by OpenAI's technology, Bits AI provided real-time recommendations for resolving issues surfaced by the observability platform. In 2025, Bits AI evolved into three autonomous agents — SRE, Dev, and Security Analyst — alongside Proactive App Recommendations and APM Investigator, shifting the platform from passive monitoring to active remediation. In July 2025, Datadog was added to the S&P 500 Index, recognizing its growth into one of the largest and most important technology companies in the market. The company Pomel and Lê-Quôc built from a New York City apartment has become an $83 billion platform serving over 28,000 customers — but the developer-centric philosophy that founded it remains the core of its identity.