Last year, Gou Rao and Vinod Jayaraman founded NeuBird with a mission to automate IT site reliability operations tasks using generative AI. The pair was well-versed in the IT challenges faced by today’s enterprises, having sold their previous cloud-native storage startup, Portworx, to PureStorage for $370 million.
"It’s very hard to find good site reliability engineers," Rao, NeuBird’s CEO, told TechCrunch. "There’s a lot of churn. It doesn’t help that the modern IT stack just keeps getting more and more complex. Humans alone cannot possibly keep up with this kind of change."
The Rise of AI-Powered SRE
To deal with the increased complexity, NeuBird built Hawkeye, an AI-powered SRE that can quickly identify, diagnose, and resolve issues, freeing human engineers for more strategic work.
Having raised a $22 million seed round from Mayfield in April (at a $100 million valuation, according to PitchBook data), NeuBird wasn’t seeking additional funding. But when Microsoft’s venture fund M12 reached out about an investment, NeuBird couldn’t say ‘no’.
The Partnership with M12
Since many of NeuBird’s customers run on Azure cloud, the partnership could help the company bring its solution to a larger market.
On Wednesday, NeuBird announced a $22.5 million seed extension round led by M12, with participation from Mayfield, Stepstone Group, and Prosperity7 Ventures.
Although extensions are often done by companies that are not growing fast, this was certainly not the case for NeuBird. Rao said he chose to call the round ‘seed-1’ precisely because NeuBird wants to raise larger funding from traditional Series A investors in the future, adding that the valuation for this round was ‘a lot higher’ than the previous financing.
Hawkeye: The AI-Powered SRE Solution
Judging by investor interest, NeuBird is on to something. Companies could ‘hire’ Hawkeye to look for active alerts and alarms in a continuous loop throughout the day. Once Hawkeye identifies an issue, it tries to troubleshoot it, but if it doesn’t succeed, it escalates the incident to a human engineer.
Hawkeye works by using LLM reasoning to check logs of any system, including custom-built ones. "LLMs have seen so many different application configuration scenarios that the fact that the LLM would run into an application log line message that it doesn’t understand is minuscule," Rao said.
Security and Data Protection
Hawkeye taps into all systems in a read-only mode, which means it doesn’t store any of the customers’ proprietary data. This ensures that NeuBird’s solution meets the highest standards of security and data protection.
"NeuBird’s approach to AI-powered SRE is unique," said an expert in the field. "By using LLMs to analyze logs and detect issues, Hawkeye provides a level of accuracy and speed that traditional SRE tools simply can’t match."
The Market Opportunity
The market for AI-powered SRE solutions is growing rapidly, driven by the increasing complexity of modern IT infrastructure.
According to a recent report, the global SRE market is expected to reach $10.3 billion by 2025, up from $4.5 billion in 2020. NeuBird’s solution is well-positioned to capture a significant share of this market.
Conclusion
NeuBird’s $22.5 million seed extension round led by M12 is a testament to the company’s innovative approach to AI-powered SRE. With Hawkeye, NeuBird is poised to revolutionize the way companies approach site reliability and error resolution.
As Rao said, "We believe that our solution will be a game-changer for the IT industry. We’re excited to partner with M12 and continue our mission to make SRE easier and more efficient."
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