Welcome Highlight to LaunchDarkly

Today, we’re thrilled to share that Highlight is officially joining the LaunchDarkly team!

As engineering teams demand more control over risk and reliability, we’re doubling down on Highlight’s observability suite to make Guarded Releases the new industry standard. With Highlight’s real-time error monitoring, logging, distributed traces, and session replay capabilities, developers can proactively catch issues in their applications.

This acquisition isn’t just about adding another tool to the stack. It’s about investing in what we believe is the future of software delivery: Guarded Releases. And Highlight is going to play a major role in making that future a reality.

What are Guarded Releases?

We introduced Guarded Releases—a new way to ship software that’s fast, incremental, and, most importantly, safer—in November 2024. With Guarded Releases, teams can control exactly who sees what, monitor impact in real-time, and roll back instantly if things go sideways. It’s how teams move fast without breaking things.

But even the best rollout controls can’t tell you what you can’t see. That’s where Highlight’s observability suite comes in.

Why safe releases matters more than ever

Modern development is a high-stakes game. Between complex architectures, rising customer expectations, and now AI applications entering the mix, teams need more than just deployment tools—they need to see what’s actually happening in production.

“With Highlight.io, pinpointing and resolving issues has been more efficient than ever, and it has revolutionized our approach to troubleshooting.”
— Abraham Soto, Blue Cross Idaho

Highlight’s feature set helps add that critical layer of insight to all of your flag-level insights in LaunchDarkly, including:

Error Monitoring – Instantly detect and alert on issues as they happen, reducing downtime and catching problems before your users even notice.
Logging – High-speed, scalable log ingestion and analysis to help you understand the full context of every event.
Tracing – End-to-end visibility across distributed systems, giving you the full picture of dependencies and performance bottlenecks.
Session Replay – See exactly what users experienced with visual, high-fidelity playback that makes debugging faster and more accurate.

All of this ladders up to our core goal: give teams the confidence to ship boldly, with the right safety nets in place.

A shared vision (and a shared love for developers)

One of the things that immediately stood out to us about the Highlight team—led by co-founders Jay Khatri and Vadim Korolik—is the common vision we share. A vision of deep respect for developers, where we can offer them the tools they need to ship with confidence and speed. Like LaunchDarkly, Highlight is built with and for developers, and they’ve nurtured a vibrant open source community that we’re excited to support and grow.

That open ethos is core to our DNA, too. We’ve long offered open-source SDKs and contributed to developer communities around the world. With Highlight onboard, we’re expanding that commitment—delivering even more powerful tools to teams who value transparency, flexibility, and speed.

“LaunchDarkly has long been the gold standard for feature management, and now it’s evolving into something even more powerful. By joining forces, we’re redefining what modern software delivery looks like—giving developers the visibility, control, and confidence they’ve always deserved.
This is a 1+1=3 moment. It’s a win for developers, a win for velocity, and a gamechanger for how software gets built. We couldn’t be more excited to help shape the new normal.”
— Jay Khatri, CEO, Highlight.io

Are you an existing LaunchDarkly user and want access to Highlight.io Session Replay, Errors, Logs, or Traces in the LaunchDarkly UI? Sign up for Early Access.

What’s next?

Jay, Vadim, and the rest of the Highlight crew are already rolling up their sleeves and getting to work as part of the LaunchDarkly team. Their expertise in scalable infrastructure and modern observability will accelerate how we build and innovate across the platform.

And if you’re curious about what’s coming next (hint: AI controls, real-time intelligence, smarter rollout strategies), you won’t want to miss Galaxy 2025, our biggest event of the year. We’ll be sharing even more on how Guarded Releases are evolving—and how you can start leveraging these capabilities in your own workflow.

Welcome to LaunchDarkly, Highlight. Let’s build the future of safe, confident software releases—together.