The company's name came from a database everyone feared. At Wireless Generation, the New York education-software firm where both founders worked, there was an Oracle system the team nicknamed Datadog17. Olivier Pomel told RTP Global that when it came time to name their own company, they dropped the 17.
Pomel grew up in France and studied computer science at the Ecole Centrale Paris, from 1996 to 1999. What fewer people know is that he is one of the original authors of VLC, the video player that millions of people still use, a line Datadog puts on his own official biography. He went on to work at IBM Research, where by one account he and Alexis Le-Quoc worked together in the mid-2000s, and then at Wireless Generation, where Pomel ran technology and Le-Quoc ran operations. They worked there together for about nine years.
They talked to potential customers, because, Pomel has said, the biggest fear was building the wrong thing.
The idea came from friction they had lived with: developers wrote code, system administrators ran it, and when something broke, the two groups blamed each other. Pomel said the frustration of switching between monitoring tools was the origin of Datadog. In 2010 they incorporated in New York City.
For the first six months they wrote no code. They talked to potential customers, because, Pomel has said, the biggest fear was building the wrong thing.
Then came the hard part. Much of the West Coast smart money passed. Pomel remembers kind rejections such as too early for us, or great idea, wrong time. One VC dismissed monitoring as a crowded market in his first pitch. Building infrastructure from New York was seen as a weakness. They stayed in Airbnbs and watched unit economics. A seed round came from NYC Seed, Contour Venture Partners and IA Ventures, then $6.2 million in 2012, led jointly by Index Ventures and RTP.
Pomel had no MBA and no prior experience as a chief executive. For a long time Datadog sold only month-to-month, so bad news surfaced fast. The first head of product also ran sales, and the first dedicated salesperson came only after the business had modest recurring revenue.
Buyers noticed. Before the IPO, Cisco reportedly offered more than $7 billion. Datadog said no, and on 19 September 2019 it sold shares at $27 on Nasdaq. The stock jumped about 37 percent that day.
In 2025 Datadog reported revenue of $3.43 billion and net income of $108 million, and its market value was about $62.7 billion on 5 November 2026. Pomel calls an IPO a starting line, not a finish line. A founder who has suffered a problem for nine years inside someone else's company can survive a lot of polite no's.