Late last year, Gou Rao and Vinod Jayaraman founded NeuBird, which uses generative AI to automate reliability operations tasks for IT sites.
Having previously sold cloud-native storage startup Portworx to PureStorage for $370 million, the duo was familiar with the IT challenges facing today's enterprises.
“It's very hard to find good site reliability engineers. There's a lot of churn,” NeuBird CEO Rao told TechCrunch. “It doesn’t help that modern IT stacks are just becoming more and more complex. Humans alone cannot keep up with these changes.”
To address that increased complexity, NeuBird built Hawkeye, an AI-powered SRE that can quickly identify, diagnose, and resolve issues, freeing up human engineers for more strategic work.
NeuBird, which raised a $22 million seed round from Mayfield in April (valued at $100 million, according to PitchBook data), was not seeking additional funding. But when Microsoft's venture fund M12 approached them about investing, NeuBird couldn't say no.
Many of NeuBird's customers run on the Azure cloud, so this partnership could help bring the company's solutions 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.
Extensions are often done by companies that aren't growing quickly, but that wasn't the case with NeuBird. Rao said he decided to call this round “Seed 1” because NeuBird hopes to raise larger funds from traditional Series A investors in the future. added that it was “much higher” than the previous funding.
Judging by investor interest, NeuBird appears to be on to something.
Businesses can “hire” Hawkeye to continuously loop and look for active alerts and alarms throughout the day. Once Hawkeye identifies an issue, it attempts to troubleshoot it, and if it's not successful, it escalates the incident to a human engineer.
Hawkeye works using LLM inference to check the logs of any system, including custom-built systems. “LLM has seen so many different application configuration scenarios that the fact that LLM encounters an application log line message that it doesn't understand is negligible,” Rao says.
Hawkeye utilizes all systems in read-only mode. This means that no sensitive customer data is stored. 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 records,” he said. “All we're looking at is health data. Are there any alerts? Are there errors in the logs? Is the CPU too high?”
The company has already successfully acquired customers ranging from major car manufacturers, financial institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and even start-ups, and has just 30 employees and one IT operations engineer who can't keep up with incident ticket processing. Only people. While some of these organizations are still piloting their products, many have moved into production mode over the past few months.
Still, while NeuBird received a high valuation from VCs in its seed round, it is far from the only startup tackling AI-powered SRE tasks. Y Combinator supported three of them in 2024 alone (SRE.ai, Opslane, Parity), and several others were launched as well as Cleric. Leading companies such as Moogsoft also offer automated incident response capabilities.
Still, like sales automation and customer service automation, many developers and DevOps departments are getting co-pilots, or teammates, as Mayfield's managing partner calls NeuBird's work. And given this level of excitement from VCs, NueBird is one to watch.
Editor's note: This article has been changed to clarify that the company's previous seed round evaluation was from PitchBook.