Traversal launches with $48M to tackle site reliability and observability with AI – News

Traversal Inc., a startup building an artificial intelligence platform focused on site reliability engineering and observability, today announced its launch with $48 million in funding.

The funds were raised across seed and Series A funding rounds led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, with participation from NFDG and Hanabi.

Downtime is a major problem for businesses, already costing the enterprise up to $1.9 million per hour, according to a report from New Relic Inc. Outages can also damage brand reputation, lead to burnout in operations engineers and turn customers away from products.  According to the report, engineering teams are spending 30% of their time addressing disruptions, with data revealing median annual downtime from high-impact outages is around 77 hours.

This issue is only worsening under the burden of AI-written code, which may soon become the majority of all code that must be maintained and debugged across enterprise systems. As developers produce more complex codebases and automate more, the challenges to site reliability engineering increase.

Founded in 2023, Traversal seeks to upend this problem by providing enterprise businesses with their own AI site reliability engineer.

Several founders of the company, including Anish Agarwal, Traversal’s chief executive, are AI researchers with extensive expertise in causal machine learning and artificial intelligence. This group includes professors from Columbia and Cornell, as well as a trader from Citadel Securities. They combine academic knowledge and practical industry experience, offering unique perspectives to develop the product.

The company’s name hearkens to how the AI is designed to “traverse” massive datasets, orchestrate tool calls and assist with pinpointing the true root causes of issues in real-time. According to Traversal, this is not just a pipe dream, its service is already deployed by major customers including DigitalOcean Holdings Inc., Eventbrite Inc., Cloudways Ltd. and several undisclosed Fortune 100 financial services.

Using the platform’s capabilities, Traversal can assist with real-time incident remediation and provide a first line of defense to stop outages. Outside of incidents, the platform can also do health checks to proactively prevent problems before they happen by watching countless warnings and alerts to detect anomalies within noisy systems and elevate the ones that matter, then recommend actionable fixes.

The Traversal team said the company’s roots remain in AI research and with the funding it will look to build an AI agent lab for the enterprise.

Image: News/Microsoft Designer