Phoebe, an agentic AI startup that acts as an ‘immune system’ for software, has secured a $17m (£12.6m) investment co-led by Google Ventures.
Based in London, Phoebe was founded by former executives of Stripe and Google to develop AI agents to remove software downtime.
According to the company, its agents continuously monitor and react to live system data, diagnosing issues as they appear and generating code and infrastructure changes to resolve them.
Software downtime can be quite costly, with research published last year by Splunk and Oxford Economics putting the cost at $400bn annually.
Co-founders Matt Henderson and James Summerfield, the former chief executive officer and chief innovation officer of Strip Europe, sold their first startup, Rangespan, to Google in 2014.
The pair was inspired to create their latest venture by, as Henderson explains, experiencing the frustration of software failures in past roles.
“High-severity incidents can make or break big customer relationships, and numerous smaller problems drain engineering productivity,” he said.
“Software monitoring tools exist, but they aren’t very intelligent and require people to spend a lot of time working out what’s wrong and what to do about it.”
Cherry Ventures co-led the investment round alongside Google Ventures.
“AI has transformed how code is written, but software reliability has not kept pace,” said Roni Hiranand of Google Ventures.
“Phoebe is building a missing layer of contextual intelligence that can help both human and AI engineers avoid software failures. We love the boldness of the team’s vision for a software immune system that preemptively fixes problems.”
The funding round, announced on Wednesday, coincides with the public launch of its platform, currently live with engineering times from a handful of early access customers including Trainline.
“Phoebe has already had a real impact on how we investigate and remediate incidents at Trainline,” said Trainline’s head of engineering for reliability and operations Jay Davies.
“Work that used to take us hours to piece together can now take minutes and that matters when you’re running critical services at our scale. We’re excited to see Phoebe progress and help us operate efficiently.”
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