Late final yr, Gou Rao and Vinod Jayaraman based NeuBird to automate IT web site reliability operations duties with generative AI.
Having bought their earlier cloud-native storage startup, Portworx, to PureStorage for $370 million, the pair was well-versed within the IT challenges confronted by at this time’s enterprises.
“It’s very onerous to search out good web site reliability engineers. There’s a whole lot of churn,” Rao, NeuBird’s CEO, instructed TechCrunch. “It doesn’t assist that the trendy IT stack simply retains getting increasingly advanced. People alone can’t probably sustain with this sort of change.”
To cope with that elevated complexity, NeuBird constructed Hawkeye, an AI-powered SRE that may shortly determine, diagnose, and resolve points, releasing human engineers for extra strategic work.
Having raised a $22 million seed spherical from Mayfield in April, NeuBird wasn’t searching for further funding. However when Microsoft’s enterprise fund M12 reached out about an funding, NeuBird couldn’t say ‘no’.
Since a lot of NeuBird’s clients run on Azure cloud, the partnership might assist the corporate deliver its answer to a bigger market.
On Wednesday, NeuBird introduced a $22.5 million seed extension spherical led by M12, with participation from Mayfield, Stepstone Group and Prosperity7 Ventures.
Though extensions are sometimes performed by corporations that aren’t rising quick, this was actually not the case for NeuBird. Rao mentioned he selected to name the spherical “seed-1” exactly as a result of NeuBird desires to lift bigger funding from conventional Sequence A traders sooner or later, including that the valuation for this spherical was “rather a lot larger” than the earlier financing.
Judging by investor curiosity, NeuBird is on to one thing.
Firms might “rent” Hawkeye to search for energetic alerts and alarms in a steady loop all through the day. As soon as Hawkeye identifies a problem, it tries to troubleshoot it, but when it doesn’t succeed, it escalates the incident to a human engineer.
Hawkeye works through the use of LLM reasoning to verify logs of any system, together with custom-built ones. “LLMs have seen so many various software configuration situations that the truth that the LLM would run into an software log line message that it doesn’t perceive is minuscule,” Rao mentioned.
Hawkeye faucets into all methods in a read-only mode, which implies it doesn’t retailer any of the shoppers’ proprietary information. That’s necessary for banks and different organizations that should safeguard personally identifiable data.
“Hawkeye doesn’t have to see the applying itself or the applying information. We don’t have to see your transactional data,” he mentioned. “All we’re is the well being information. Are there any alarms? Are there any errors within the logs? Is the CPU too excessive?”
The corporate has already succeeded in touchdown clients starting from giant automotive manufacturing corporations, monetary establishments, prescribed drugs, and even startups, with as few as 30 staff and just one IT operations engineer who will not be in a position to sustain with incident tickets. Whereas a few of these organizations are nonetheless piloting the product, many have moved to manufacturing mode during the last couple of months.
Nonetheless, whereas NeuBird has obtained VCs throwing cash at it, with excessive valuations, at its seed spherical, it’s not the one startup engaged on AI-powered SRE duties. Y Combinator has supported three of them in 2024 alone (SRE.ai, Opslane, Parity) and some others have launched as properly like Cleric. And greater gamers, like Moogsoft, additionally provide automated incident response options.
Nonetheless, like gross sales automation and customer support automation, copilots, or teammates, as Mayfield’s managing accomplice calls what NeuBird does, are coming for a lot of developer and DevOps capabilities. And with this stage of pleasure from VCs, NueBird is one to look at.
