Selector Software raises $33M funding round to fix network outages with AI

Artificial intelligence-native network monitoring startup Selector Software Inc. said today it has closed on a $33 million round of funding, bringing its total amount raised to date to more than $66 million.

Today’s Series B round was led by Ansa Capital and saw participation from existing investors Two Bear Capital, Atlantic Bridge and Sinewave Ventures, plus new investors such as AT&T, Bell, Singtel Innov8 and Hyperlink Ventures.

The startup is the creator of an AI-powered event intelligence platform that’s designed to give telecommunications providers and other enterprises deep insights and visibility into their complex networks and application infrastructures, so they can identify the source of any problems that occur.

According to Selector, modern enterprises face having to deal with a significant increase in complexity as they migrate their most critical systems and applications to the cloud. As they do this, they’re also dealing with an increasing number of new technologies, and the result is that they end up facing more complex and frequent outages, for both networks and applications. However, many organizations slack the teams and expertise to deal with such issues quickly enough, resulting in extended downtime when issues occur.

The problem is that up to 90% of the repair time is spent on trying to locate the origin of the issue that’s causing the outage. When incidents occur, teams have to wade through massive volumes of data to try and work out what has gone wrong and what they need to fix, and this is where Selector’s platform comes in handy.

Selector reckons it can reduce the time it takes to find the cause of issues to just a few seconds. By interfacing directly with an organization’s network language model platform, it creates a digital twin of their infrastructure that allows it to model how everything is running normally. This makes it easier to understand the source of any issues that occur, and teams can then engage in real-time, natural language conversations with their infrastructure stack via the Selector Copilot to determine exactly what has gone wrong.

Selector co-founder and Chief Executive Kannan Kothandaraman said even a second’s downtime is too much for some organization’s most mission-critical networking infrastructure. Teams need a way to instantly understand what’s wrong, and that’s what his company’s platform is trying to deliver.

“Solving this problem requires auto-correlating across enormous volumes of data, and that’s why we exist,” he said. “We’ve spent the last five years demonstrating how autonomous AI technology and human network expertise can work together to ensure that the world’s most demanding networks are up, operating, and generating revenue at all times. We’re now ready to scale this work significantly.”

Kothandaraman and his co-founder Nitin Kumar acquired their networking expertise at Juniper Networks Inc., and have hired a team of network and large language model experts from that company, as well as others from Cisco Systems Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Nutanix Inc. and VMware Inc.

They reckon Selector’s technology has already been deployed by a number of large enterprises, including Canada’s largest telecommunications company, one of the world’s biggest web and email hosting service providers and a leading provider of managed software-defined networking services.

With the funding from today’s round, Selector aims to improve its AIOps stack and expand its geographic footprint, opening new offices across the U.S., Canada, Europe, Singapore, India and Japan.

Ansa Capital General Partner Allan Jean-Baptiste said he believes Selector can help to solve a very expensive problem for some of the world’s largest companies.

“The rise of cloud technology, distributed microservices, and the need for seamless 24/7 performance have significantly increased the demands on enterprise network teams,” Jean-Baptiste said. “Selector has proven that it can achieve 360-degree visibility across networks and prescribe action instantly after an incident occurs.”

Images: Selector