Olivier Pomel grew up in France and took a master's in computer science at Ecole Centrale Paris. He is one of the original authors of the VLC media player. His early jobs were at the start-ups Neomeo and Silicongo and at IBM Research.
He later moved to New York and became vice president of technology at Wireless Generation, an education technology company. There he worked alongside Alexis Le-Quoc, a friend from engineering school who ran operations. The two shared a running joke about a difficult Oracle database called Datadog17.
They founded Datadog in 2010 and raised a seed round from New York investors. Pomel has recalled polite refusals from West Coast investors who said the idea was good but the timing was wrong. He has also said the company wrote no code for its first six months and only spoke to customers, because his biggest fear was building the wrong product. Index Ventures and RTP Ventures led a $6.2 million Series A in 2012.
Bloomberg reported in 2019 that Cisco had offered more than $7 billion for Datadog, which turned it down. The company listed on Nasdaq on 19 September 2019 at $27 a share and joined the S&P 500 in July 2025. It reported revenue of $3.43 billion in fiscal 2025, and its market value was about $62.7 billion in November 2026, according to companiesmarketcap.com.