Late last year, Gou Rao and Vinod Jayaraman founded NeuBird to automate IT site reliability operations tasks through generative AI.
The pair, who previously sold cloud-based storage startup Portworx to PureStorage for $370 million, are well-versed in the IT challenges facing businesses today.
“It’s very difficult to find good site reliability engineers. There is a lot of churn,” NeuBird CEO Rao told TechCrunch. “It doesn’t help that modern IT stacks are becoming increasingly complex. “Humans alone cannot keep up with these changes.”
To handle the increased complexity, NeuBird built Hawkeye, an AI-powered SRE that can quickly identify, diagnose, and resolve issues, freeing human engineers to focus on more strategic tasks.
NeuBird, which raised a $22 million seed round from Mayfield last April, has not sought additional funding. But when Microsoft’s venture fund M12 offered to invest, Newbird couldn’t take no for an answer.
Since many of NeuBird’s customers use the Azure cloud, this partnership can help the company bring its solutions to a larger market.
On Wednesday, NeuBird announced a $22.5 million seed expansion round led by M12 with participation from Mayfield, Stepstone Group, and Prosperity7 Ventures.
Scaling is often the case for companies that aren’t growing quickly, but that certainly wasn’t the case for NeuBird. Rao said NeuBird decided to call this round “Seed-1” because it hopes to raise larger funding from traditional Series A investors in the future. And he added that the valuation of this round was “much higher” than previous financings.
Judging by investor interest, NeuBird is onto something.
Businesses can “hire” Hawkeye to find active alerts and alerts in a continuous loop throughout the day. When Hawkeye identifies a problem, it attempts to resolve the issue, but if not successful, escalates the incident to a human engineer.
Hawkeye works by using LLM heuristics to check the logs of any system, including custom systems. “LLM has seen so many different application configuration scenarios that it is very unlikely that we will come across an application log line message that LLM does not understand,” said Rao.
Hawkeye utilizes all systems in read-only mode. This means that we do not store any of our customers’ proprietary data. This is important for banks and other organizations that need to protect personally identifiable information.
“Hawkeye doesn’t need to see the application itself or the application data. We don’t need to see your transaction history,” he said. “All we’re looking at is health data. Is there an alarm? Are there any errors in the log? Is my CPU too high?”
The company had already succeeded in attracting a wide range of customers, including large automakers, financial institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and even startups, and had just 30 employees and only one IT operations engineer who was unable to handle incident tickets. While some of these organizations are still testing their products, many have moved into production mode over the past few months.
Nonetheless, NeuBird is not the only startup doing AI-based SRE work, although it is giving VCs money in its seed round at a high valuation. Y Combinator supported three of them (SRE.ai, Opslane, and Parity) in 2024 alone, and like Cleric, several others have also been released. Large companies like Moogsoft also offer automated incident response capabilities.
Still, it comes with a lot of developer and DevOps capabilities, like sales automation and customer service automation, a co-pilot or teammate, as Mayfield’s managing partner calls NeuBird’s role. And this level of excitement in VC makes NueBird one to watch.
Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to clarify that the company’s previous seed round valuation came from PitchBook.
