Datadog, a heavily funded cloud monitoring platform for applications and infrastructure, has acquired under-the-radar French startup Madumbo, which develops an AI-powered web app-testing service. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2010, New York-based Datadog offers a DevOps toolset that enables developers to monitor everything in their stack, aggregating metrics and events across all of their databases, servers, apps, and more under a single unified view. Founded out of Paris in 2017, Madumbo provides an automated platform that helps companies determine whether a web app is performing as it should. Madumbo's bot checks for errors using code run from a real browser, meaning it should be able to detect the same issues end users experience.

Netflix has spent years building and improving its recommendation engine, and even sponsored a $1 million contest to improve its algorithm. But now anyone can download and tinker with this kind of software, thanks to a new open source project. "We wanted to build fast," says Shelby.tv CEO Reece Pacheco. "We were impressed with the product and the team [Mortar Data] had built." The company also wanted the freedom to build its own recommendation engine in the future.