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Serial Founder Leverages Domain Expertise with Tero

Today, Ben Johnson announced his new company, Tero ( https://www.usetero.com/ ), and I’m thrilled that we at NextView Ventures are joining him on this journey. Read why we invested below 👇 There’s something uniquely powerful about a second-time founder setting out to build again. Experienced entrepreneurs bring with them the lessons – both the hard-won wisdom from past challenges and the confidence from prior successes – that prepare them for the next climb. The data backs up that serial founders have higher odds of success. But what’s especially compelling is when that next act happens within the same domain, where the founder can draw upon deep expertise, longstanding relationships, and an instinctive understanding of how the market really works. That’s exactly why our investment in Ben Johnson’s Tero is so special. We were fortunate to partner with Ben on his previous company, Timber, the creator of the widely adopted open-source observability project Vector, which was ultimately acquired by Datadog. So when Ben approached me not too long ago with his next idea, I immediately knew it was something I wanted to be a part of. Tero is tackling one of the most fundamental and costly challenges in observability and platform engineering: data quality. Modern engineering teams generate massive volumes of telemetry data across services, logs, and metrics. But a surprising percentage of that data is redundant, low-value, or outright waste… slowing systems, inflating costs, and eroding trust in the tools meant to provide clarity. Tero is building the intelligence layer for observability: a context graph for enterprise observability data that enables teams to finally answer critical questions like “How much of our data is waste?” and “Which services are generating it?” The most elegant part of the product? Engineers can remove that waste with a single click directly inside the tools they already use without any infrastructure changes. It’s early days, but the vision is clear: to help engineers take back control of their data and restore trust in observability. With Tero, Ben is joined by Nihar Singhal , a former colleague from SeatGeek and a familiar face to the NextView team. Nihar brings deep go-to-market experience and complements Ben’s product and technical strength perfectly. In conjunction with today’s launch, Tero is announcing a $2.6M seed round led by myself on behalf of NextView Ventures, alongside our friends at Founder Collective . It’s a privilege to back Ben again, this time as he and Nihar set out to redefine how enterprises understand and manage their telemetry data. We’re proud to be partners in helping Tero bring trust, clarity, and efficiency back to the heart of observability.