[ad_1]
Late last year, Gou Rao and Vinod Jayaraman founded NeuBird to automate IT site reliability operations tasks using generative AI.
Having sold their previous cloud storage startup, Portworx, to PureStorage for $370 million, the couple was well-versed in the IT challenges faced by today’s organizations.
“It’s very difficult to find good site reliability engineers. There’s a lot of chaos,” Rao, NeuBird’s CEO, told TechCrunch. “What makes it worse is that the modern IT stack is getting more complex. Humans alone cannot keep up with this kind of change.
To handle this increasing complexity, NeuBird built Hawkeye, an AI-powered SRE system that can quickly identify, diagnose and resolve problems, freeing up human engineers to do more strategic work.
Having raised a $22 million seed round from Mayfield in April, NeuBird has not been seeking additional funding. But when Microsoft’s M12 venture fund approached about investing, NeuBird couldn’t say no.
Since many of NeuBird’s customers operate on the Azure cloud, the partnership could help the company bring its solution to a larger market.
NeuBird on Wednesday announced a $22.5 million seed extension round led by M12, with participation from Mayfield, Stepstone Group and Prosperity7 Ventures.
Although extensions are often made by companies that are not growing quickly, this was certainly not the case for NeuBird. Rao said he chose to call the round “Seed 1” specifically because NeuBird wants to raise larger funding from traditional Series A investors in the future, adding that the valuation for this round was “significantly higher” than previous funding.
Judging by investor interest, NeuBird is on to something.
Businesses can “rent” Hawkeye to search for active alerts and alarms on a continuous loop throughout the day. Once Hawkeye identifies a problem, he attempts to troubleshoot it, but if unsuccessful, he escalates the incident to a human engineer.
Hawkeye works using LLM logic to verify any system’s logs, including custom-designed logs. “LLM has seen so many different application configuration scenarios that the fact that LLM might encounter an application log line message that it doesn’t understand is insignificant,” Rao said.
Hawkeye accesses all systems in read-only mode, which means it does not store any client data. This is important for banks and other organizations that must protect personally identifiable information.
“Hawkeye doesn’t need to see the app itself or the app data. We don’t need to see your transaction logs,” he said. “All we look at is health data. Are there any alarms? Are there any errors in the logs? Is the CPU too high?
The company has already attracted clients ranging from large automakers, financial institutions, pharmaceuticals and even startups, with at least 30 employees and just one IT operations engineer unable to keep up with incident tickets. While some of these organizations are still piloting the product, many have moved into production mode over the past couple of months.
However, while NeuBird has VCs pouring money into it, at high valuations, in its seed round, it’s not the only startup working on AI-powered SRE missions. Y Combinator backed three of them in 2024 alone (SRE.ai, Opslane, Parity) and a few of them have also launched like Cleric. Major companies, such as Moogsoft, also offer automatic incident response features.
However, like sales automation and customer service automation, co-pilots, or teammates, as Mayfield’s managing partner calls what NeuBird does, come for many developer and DevOps jobs. With this level of excitement from venture capitalists, NueBird is one company to watch.
[ad_2]