Episode #96: Meet the Startup Optimizing Telemetry Data for a More Efficient Future

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  Speaker 1:
  What if I told you that the cost of data is breaking the bank for engineering firms, or that solving this problem might just transform how companies manage the growing flood of telemetry data? Welcome to the Tech Optimist, where today we’re taking you inside the story of Sawmills, a startup that’s revolutionizing telemetry management.

  In this episode, we’re going to sit down with Ronit Belson, co-founder and CEO at Sawmills, to explore the challenges in observability data, why current solutions are unsustainable, and how their smart telemetry platform is helping teams cut costs while boosting data quality.

  It’s a fascinating dive into the intersection of AI, engineering efficiency, and a rapidly evolving tech space. We’re going to pause here for a quick word from our sponsors and a reminder about our disclosure.

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  Speaker 1:
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  Telemetry data—it’s the backbone of modern engineering teams, but it’s also becoming a massive, unsustainable headache. As systems generate more observable data than ever, teams are struggling to keep up with skyrocketing storage costs, irrelevant data, and overwhelmed tools.

  The problem isn’t just too much data—it’s that we’re collecting everything, even when only a fraction of it is actually actionable. The result: wasted resources, distracted engineers, and insights buried in the noise.

  This is where Sawmills steps in. Their smart telemetry platform doesn’t just manage this flood of data—it redefines how teams handle it, reducing waste while keeping what matters most. This isn’t just a solution; it’s a rethinking of the entire approach to observability. So let’s dive into how they’re making telemetry smarter, cheaper, and even more impactful.

  Ronit Belson:
  And we kept hearing the same thing time after time after time. When we got to somewhere between the 10th to 20th person we talked to and we heard exactly the same thing, we stopped and we said, “Listen, the market is telling us something. These people are telling us something. Let’s listen.”

  Speaker 1:
  Joining us today is someone who truly embodies innovation and leadership in this ever-changing tech world: Ronit Belson, co-founder and CEO at Sawmills, an AI-powered software company revolutionizing telemetry data management.

  With over two decades of experience scaling startups and driving growth, Ronit has built a reputation as a dynamic leader in B2B technology. Throughout her career, Ronit has held key leadership positions, including COO at Testim.io, Rollout.io, and Cloudmeter—companies that were successfully acquired by industry leaders like Tricentis, CloudBees, and Splunk. She’s no stranger to taking startups from vision to reality.

  Her educational foundation is equally impressive, with a BA in Economics and Japanese from the Hebrew University and an MBA from the University of Rochester’s Simon School of Business. At Sawmills, Ronit is leading the charge in AI-driven solutions to help engineering teams streamline data management and cut costs. She’s also a champion of partnerships, emphasizing the power of aligning mutual goals to drive success.

  We’re excited to dive into her journey, the story of Sawmills, and her vision for the future of telemetry and AI.

  Ronit Belson:
  What they told us was so clear: “The amount of money we pay today for our observability solution is not sustainable. We love our observability mostly, but we can’t use it as effectively as we want—it’s just too expensive.”

  We figured out the root cause of the problem. We knew there was a problem; now we needed to figure out the root cause. And the third thing we had to do was come up with a solution to the problem—and that’s what we’ve done.

  Wesley Yiu:
  Observability, obviously, is a very big space. In the last decade, companies have been formed or evolved over the years, with multi-billion-dollar market caps. All of them are public today.

  Speaker 1:
  Joining us today as our Alumni Ventures host is Wesley Yiu—not a stranger to this show, a seasoned investor and one of the sharpest minds in venture capital. Wesley is a partner at Alumni Ventures, where he’s spent years helping early-stage startups turn bold ideas into thriving businesses.

  With a strong foundation in technology and finance, Wesley brings a wealth of experience to the table. From his early days at Goldman Sachs to his leadership at Triphammer Ventures, Wesley has built a reputation for identifying groundbreaking companies across sectors like AI, SaaS, and IoT. As someone deeply connected to the Cornell Alumni Network, he excels at finding the innovators and disruptors shaping our future.

  Telemetry data is the unsung hero of engineering teams—but it’s also the biggest pain point. In this opening segment, we’re going to explore how data overload, rising costs, and inefficiencies in observability have created a massive challenge for teams worldwide. This is the foundation for why today’s guest, Ronit Belson, and her company Sawmills, are tackling this issue head-on.

  Wesley Yiu:
  So why don’t we jump into what Sawmills is all about—maybe first starting off with what was the motivation for the team to build this company in the first place?

  Ronit Belson:
  So we actually started with ideation, going through a lot of ideas. Eventually, we settled on one we thought was good and the market needed. It was around code instrumentation. I won’t bore you with it because we didn’t go that route.

  We started meeting with VPs of Engineering, CTOs, heads of DevOps—because we knew that’s the market with a lot of challenges we wanted to tackle. We started meeting with them, and the first one tells us, “Great, really interesting—not my biggest problem.”

  “What’s your biggest problem?”

  “How much I’m paying today for my observability.”

  Okay, great—that’s the number one problem. Went and talked to the second one—heard exactly the same thing. We pitched one thing; they said, “It’s not our biggest problem. The biggest problem is cost.”

  Ronit Belson:
  So we said, okay, let’s dive a little bit deeper and understand what’s going on there. And what was really clear is that almost all observability solutions have pricing related to the amount of data that is sent to the observability solution. This data is called telemetry data. It comes in the form of logs, metrics, and traces. That data has grown quite significantly in the last, I don’t know, 5 to 10 years. It grows 35% year over year, according to a New Relic article or research.

  When we talked to people, they also said, “You know what? We send a lot of information.” But when you ask them, “How much of that information do you actually need?” The answer really surprised us. It was somewhere between 10% to 40%, and it was more toward 10% than 40%. So if you combine the two, you have a big issue around cost—data grows rapidly year over year, and a lot of the data you send today is practically junk; you don’t need it. That obviously means you don’t have control over your telemetry data, and there is a great opportunity to help you there.

  Speaker 1:
  All right. Let’s pump the brakes a little bit. Let’s take a moment to break down telemetry data and observability—the two key terms in today’s conversation. We’re going to hear them a lot, and you’ve heard them a lot already.

  Telemetry data is the information that systems collect about their performance and behavior. Think of it like a health tracker for software, kind of like an Apple Watch. It monitors things like response times, errors, and resource usage, like memory or CPU. This data helps engineers understand what’s working and what’s not.

  Observability is the ability to use that telemetry data to figure out what’s happening inside these complex systems. It’s like having a doctor analyze your health tracker to diagnose issues and improve your overall performance.

  Observability focuses on collecting three core types of data, which Ronit talked about earlier:

  • Metrics: numbers like response time or error rates

  • Logs: detailed event records for troubleshooting

  • Traces: a step-by-step view of how data flows through the system

  Together, telemetry and observability help teams catch problems early, improve reliability, and keep everything running smoothly.

  Okay. Now that we’re up to speed, let’s hop back in.

  Wesley Yiu:
  You talked about costs as being one of the chief concerns of the personas you spoke to in this space. How do you see the observability data space evolving in the future, especially as you build Sawmills today?

  Ronit Belson:
  Right. I think that what we do is going to become a category, and that’s the telemetry management category. I know that there are other startups tackling this. It’s exactly like you have on the BI side, where you have platforms that help you manage data. The same thing will happen in the observability space.

  From one end, there are going to be companies—eventually there’ll be a winner—but there will be more than one company that becomes the telemetry management platform. Hopefully, it will be us.

  On the observability side, think of observability as almost like a BI solution for telemetry data. Companies like Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, and Splunk—I see them changing primarily with AI taking a front-and-center role. I believe it will mostly help us get to the root cause of problems faster because today that’s really difficult.

  Another part of AI will be helping create reports and dashboards faster because today it’s still pretty difficult to do.

  So let me give you a shorter answer: On one end, I believe the telemetry management category will grow rapidly. It’s not just about cost—it’s about giving you control over the data, releasing you from vendor lock-in, improving data quality, and reducing costs by not sending everything to your observability solution. That will grow as a category by itself.

  On the observability side, AI will become front and center. It will help with better root cause analysis and an easier, more efficient way to create reports and dashboards.

  Wesley Yiu:
  Got it. Have you been working closely or having dialogues with a lot of the observable players that exist today?

  Ronit Belson:
  We are very new. We didn’t talk about it, but we closed our funding in April of last year, 2024. Since then, we’ve just been building the product together with design partners. But we did start having conversations. We were approached by a few of the large observability providers, so we’ve had some early discussions. But our main focus today is building the product. Moving forward, I’m sure we’ll have relationships with them.

  Wesley Yiu:
  How would you say your background as a multi-time executive and founder has impacted your ability to build Sawmills today?

  Ronit Belson:
  As you go through your career, there’s one thing everybody gains, and that’s experience. Experience comes with the good, the bad, the ugly, the great. What I do now—what I feel strongly almost every day—is that it’s a culmination of everything I’ve learned throughout the years and throughout my experience.

  Starting companies, working for startups, and growing companies has its great sides but also its challenges. I feel like I’m able to take everything I’ve learned and apply it now.

  Wesley Yiu:
  Excellent. We understand that building companies is not an easy process by any means, and success is rarely achieved by a single individual. For this journey at Sawmills, you’ve chosen two great co-founders. I’m curious—why did you choose them, what do they bring to the table, and how do they complement your core skill set?

  Ronit Belson:
  Sure. You’re absolutely right. Choosing co-founders is the most important thing you do when starting a company. The second most important thing is choosing your investors. But number one is choosing your partners for the journey.

  I have two co-founders: our Chief Product Officer, Erez, and our CTO, Amir.

  If you think about the expertise needed when starting a company, you need someone on the technical side, someone on the product side, and someone on the go-to-market side. We cover all three. The three of us come from dev tools and DevOps backgrounds, so we have a founder-market fit and cover the main areas needed when building a company.

  Specifically, Erez and I worked together before. In fact, Erez was my manager at Rollout—he was the CEO and co-founder, and I was the COO. We really enjoyed working together. When Rollout was acquired, he went to CloudBees, and I decided not to go and joined Testim instead. We always said we wanted to work together again someday.

  When the time came—I decided to leave Tricentis, and he decided to leave CloudBees—we said, “Okay, this is the time.” We joined forces. This time, I took the CEO role and he took the product role, but we are partners.

  We knew we were missing the technical aspect, so we went on a journey to find someone. We were lucky enough to be introduced to Amir. At the time, Amir was VP of Engineering at New Relic, in charge of their AIOps.

  We met with him and there was an immediate click. We knew he was the guy. We didn’t know if we could convince him, but I think he saw what we saw—a huge opportunity to work together. At the time, we didn’t even have a concrete idea; we were still in the ideation phase.

  But the opportunity of having three people with extensive experience, each bringing different expertise and a strong connection, was too good to pass up. He joined us—and that’s how we formed as a team.

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  Wesley Yiu:
  So you’re just coming out of stealth with our podcast here. You’ll have a broader announcement that people will see as well. Is there anything you can share to tease out what Sawmills is all about, what you guys are focused on in the near term, and the path forward for the business?

  Ronit Belson:
  Sure. As I mentioned, we are in the telemetry management space. What we’re building is a smart telemetry management platform. It’s a platform that allows companies to get the most out of their telemetry data—at a petabyte scale and a fraction of the cost.

  Again, we are not the observability solution. We are the smart telemetry management platform. We sit between the data producers—your applications, your infrastructure, anything sending telemetry data—and the destinations, which are your observability solutions.

  We sit in the middle. We’re able to understand the data and then allow you, in a very easy way, to control that data.

  But we don’t stop there. We also provide an understanding of what part of that data you truly need, in the form that it is, and give you recommendations on what you can do with the data to (A) reduce your cost and (B) improve its quality.

  For example, as data flows through us, we can identify debug data or debug logs that you send to your production observability solution. These are typically very verbose logs that you don’t need in your operational dashboards.

  As we see this, we can recommend dropping it or routing it to S3 or another storage. If you have a lot of similar log lines, we can recommend summarizing these logs—which can reduce costs for certain observability solutions.

  With just one click, you can take these actions as the data flows, improving both cost efficiency and data quality.

  Wesley Yiu:
  Absolutely. Look, I’m personally excited. This is a space that, in my belief, you’re kind of creating—a new category alongside an existing market that has done very well over the last decade and a half. Lots of money has flowed into this space, and with the proliferation of AI, we’re seeing tons of data growing every day.

  So, I’m super excited about the path forward here. From your perspective, what should people be most excited about with Sawmills as you build in this space?

  Ronit Belson:
  I think the number one burning issue today is cost. We’ve talked a lot about cost. We’ve mentioned how understanding the data allows us to make recommendations and provide one-click actions to reduce costs once you know what can be done with the data.

  But it doesn’t stop there. When you truly understand the data and can take simple actions on it, you can do much more.

  You can enrich the data to improve the effectiveness of your observability solution. You can standardize your logs, making root cause analysis much easier when the data reaches the observability tool.

  I believe that when we give customers the ability to understand and control data before it leaves their system, it enables them to do much more with it. From one end, we can reduce waste, and from another, we can ensure that the data entering the observability solution allows you to get more value than you do today.

  Wesley Yiu:
  Maybe one last question for you—what’s coming next? What do you see as the long-term vision for the business? I know it’s early, but what are you planning for the next year or two?

  Ronit Belson:
  Sure. In the beginning, we were very focused on observability. We are growing our number of integrations, and we’ll continue doing that. But we’re also heavily investing in the “smart” part of observability.

  This means having the ability to deeply understand the data, provide the most effective recommendations possible, and enable you to take simple, context-specific actions based on the problem or opportunity we’ve identified.

  One unique challenge here is the situation DevOps teams face. DevOps teams are typically responsible for the observability solution and its cost. They must ensure engineers have effective observability tools.

  But the problem is created by developers—the ones generating telemetry data. And developers don’t prioritize it; they focus on writing features. So you have a situation where one group creates challenges while another bears the responsibility and cost.

  A smart telemetry data management product solves this by allowing DevOps to give developers a very simple way to take corrective actions. Today, DevOps has to chase developers for fixes. This is a critical pain point in the space that we’re addressing.

  Ronit Belson:
  What’s unique about developers? They don’t care about it that much. They care about writing features. So you have here a problem where, on one end, you have one group that creates the challenges and another group that is in charge of the outcome of those challenges.

  What a smart telemetry data management product does is allow DevOps to provide developers with a really simple way to take action. Today, they have to chase them. This is very important to understand. I know it’s probably not related to the question you asked, but it’s something really important to know about the specific challenges DevOps teams face.

  But I don’t remember—what was your question? And I don’t know how I got there. So remind me, what was your question?

  Wesley Yiu:
  Just the evolution that you have in your head as to where Sawmills goes from here?

  Ronit Belson:
  Correct. So that’s why I told you that part of the story—because the smart part plays a big role in making it effective.

  To make DevOps and engineers work together to solve that problem I described before—too much data being sent into observability, poor-quality data, inconsistent data—you need a solution that is as smart as possible. It needs to allow DevOps to make developers actively help fix the challenges that are being created. So we are investing a lot in that smart part of the solution.

  Wesley Yiu:
  Excellent. Well, that wraps it up for me. Ronit, I appreciate you spending time with us to walk through the story of Sawmills. I know it’s early here, but we’re super excited. You just came out of stealth, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store for the company from here on out.

  For folks listening to the Tech Optimist podcast today, we appreciate you taking the time to join us. If you’re in engineering or DevOps, definitely check out Sawmills—we can’t wait to see what’s next for them.

  Speaker 1:
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  As always, keep building.