# Subtrace

**Source:** https://geo.sig.ai/brands/subtrace  
**Vertical:** Developer Tools  
**Subcategory:** General  
**Tier:** Emerging  
**Website:** subtrace.dev  
**Last Updated:** 2026-04-15

## Summary

Zero-code eBPF network tracer giving backend teams full request visibility without instrumentation; YC-backed with 2.5K GitHub stars used by YC companies to reduce incident resolution from months to minutes.

## Company Overview

Subtrace is a US-based zero-code network observability platform — backed by Y Combinator — providing backend engineering teams with full request-level visibility into every API call, database query, and service interaction across their infrastructure without requiring code instrumentation, agent installation, or root privileges. Using eBPF (Extended Berkeley Packet Filter) kernel technology, Subtrace captures complete request payloads, latency metrics, HTTP status codes, headers, and correlated logs from the operating system network layer — providing the "inspect element for your infrastructure" that traditional APM tools (Sentry, Datadog, OpenTelemetry) cannot deliver without significant instrumentation investment.

Subtrace's eBPF-based architecture is the technical differentiation: traditional observability tools require adding logging statements, wrapping function calls, or installing language-specific agents that instrument application code. Subtrace's kernel-level capture happens at the network interface — every TCP connection is visible regardless of the programming language, framework, or application configuration — making deployment a single command that provides immediate full visibility into all network traffic. The 2,500+ GitHub stars and adoption by YC companies like Trieve (W24) validate the developer community's appetite for zero-instrumentation observability. Trieve's example of reducing incident resolution time from months to minutes (using Subtrace to find the specific API call causing a production issue) illustrates the time-to-insight advantage.

In 2025, Subtrace competes in the observability and APM (application performance monitoring) market with Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG, $2.7B revenue full-stack observability), Sentry (application monitoring, $217M raised), and OpenTelemetry ecosystem tools for backend network visibility. The observability market has been growing rapidly as cloud-native architectures increase the complexity of distributed system debugging. Subtrace's zero-code approach represents an emerging category of eBPF-based observability (alongside companies like Groundcover and Pixie, both eBPF-based) that competes with the instrumentation-heavy traditional APM approach. Y Combinator's backing connects Subtrace with the developer tools ecosystem. The 2025 strategy focuses on building the persistent storage and query layer for historical traffic analysis, expanding the Kubernetes cluster deployment for cloud-native environments, and growing the security monitoring use case alongside performance observability.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### What does Subtrace do?
Subtrace is a zero-code network tracer providing full visibility into backend requests.

### Who are Subtrace's customers?
Backend development teams and DevOps engineers.

### When was Subtrace founded?
Subtrace was founded in 2024.

### Where is Subtrace based?
San Francisco, CA.

### How much funding has Subtrace raised?
They are backed by Y Combinator as part of the W25 batch.

### What makes Subtrace different?
Uses BPF for zero-code instrumentation without root privileges, with Chrome DevTools-like interface.

### Who are Subtrace's competitors?
Sentry, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, and other observability tools.

### How can I contact Subtrace?
Visit their website or GitHub.

### Is Subtrace hiring?
Check their website for current openings.

### What's the latest news about Subtrace?
YC companies like Trieve use it to reduce incident resolution from months to minutes.

## Tags

b2b, developer-tools, platform, saas

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*Data from geo.sig.ai Brand Intelligence Database. Updated 2026-04-15.*