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Late last year , Gou Rao and Vinod Jayaraman founded NeuBird to automate IT site reliability operations tasks with productive AI .
Having sold their former cloud - native storage startup , Portworx , to PureStorage for $ 370 million , the pair was well - versed in the IT challenges face by today ’s enterprises .
“ It ’s very unvoiced to find good land site dependableness engineer . There ’s a lot of churn , ” Rao , NeuBird ’s chief executive officer , tell TechCrunch . “ It does n’t help that the modern IT plenty just keeps getting more and more complex . Humans alone can not possibly keep up with this kind of change . ”
To dispense with that increase complexity , NeuBird built Hawkeye , an AI - powered SRE that can quickly identify , diagnose , and solve issues , freeing human engineers for more strategic work .
Having rear a$22 million seeded player roundfrom Mayfield in April ( at a $ 100 million valuation , according to PitchBook data point ) , NeuBird was n’t seek extra funding . But when Microsoft ’s speculation fund M12 reached out about an investment , NeuBird could n’t say ‘ no ’ .
Since many of NeuBird ’s customers run on bright blue cloud , the partnership could help the company bring its solution to a larger grocery store .
On Wednesday , NeuBird announced a $ 22.5 million seed extension round led by M12 , with engagement from Mayfield , Stepstone Group and Prosperity7 Ventures .
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Although extensions are often done by companies that are not growing tight , this was certainly not the eccentric for NeuBird . Rao say he chose to call the round “ seed-1 ” precisely because NeuBird wants to raise bombastic funding from traditional Series A investors in the time to come , tot that the valuation for this round was “ a mess high ” than the late financing .
label by investor interest group , NeuBird is on to something .
Companies could “ rent ” Hawkeye to look for active alarum and warning signal in a continuous loop throughout the sidereal day . Once Hawkeye identifies an government issue , it taste to trouble-shoot it , but if it does n’t succeed , it escalates the incident to a human engineer .
Hawkeye crop by using LLM abstract thought to check out log of any system , admit custom - built ones . “ Master of Laws have encounter so many unlike app configuration scenario that the fact that the LLM would run into an app logarithm melodic phrase substance that it does n’t see is minuscule , ” Rao order .
Hawkeye taps into all system in a show - only mode , which means it does n’t hive away any of the customer ’ proprietary information . That ’s important for banks and other organization that must safeguard in person identifiable information .
“ Hawkeye does n’t need to see the software itself or the software data . We do n’t need to see your transactional book , ” he said . “ All we ’re looking at is the health data . Are there any alarms ? Are there any fault in the logs ? Is the central processor too high ? ”
The company has already bring home the bacon in landing client ranging from large car manufacturing company , financial mental hospital , pharmaceutical , and even startups , with as few as 30 employees and only one IT operation engineer who is not able to keep up with incident ticket . While some of these organizations are still navigate the product , many have move to product style over the last couplet of calendar month .
Still , while NeuBird has drive VCs throwing money at it , with high valuations , at its source round , it ’s not the only inauguration work on AI - power SRE tasks . Y Combinator has supported three of them in 2024 alone ( SRE.ai , Opslane , Parity ) and a few others have establish as well like Cleric . And bigger player , like Moogsoft , also offer automated incident response characteristic .
Still , likesales automationandcustomer serviceautomation , copilots , orteammates , as Mayfield ’s managing mate calls what NeuBird does , are get along for many developer and DevOps functions . And with this level of excitement from VCs , NueBird is one to watch .
