Late last year, Gou Rao and Vinod Jayaraman launched NeuBird, a startup aiming to automate IT site reliability engineering (SRE) tasks using generative AI.
After selling their previous venture, Portworx, a cloud-native storage startup, to PureStorage for $370 million, the duo had firsthand experience with the IT challenges enterprises face today.
“Finding skilled site reliability engineers is tough, and there’s a lot of turnover,” said Rao, NeuBird’s CEO, in an interview with TechCrunch. “The growing complexity of modern IT systems only worsens the issue. Human engineers can’t keep up with the pace of these changes alone.”
To tackle this problem, NeuBird developed Hawkeye, an AI-driven SRE tool designed to quickly detect, diagnose, and fix issues, allowing engineers to focus on strategic tasks.
NeuBird initially raised $22 million in a seed round led by Mayfield in April, valuing the company at $100 million (as reported by PitchBook). While they weren’t actively looking for more funding, Microsoft’s venture arm, M12, reached out with an offer the team couldn’t refuse.
With many NeuBird customers using Microsoft Azure, the partnership could help expand the reach of their product. On Wednesday, NeuBird announced a $22.5 million seed extension round led by M12, with support from Mayfield, Stepstone Group, and Prosperity7 Ventures.
Although seed extensions are often associated with slow growth, this wasn’t the case for NeuBird. Rao described the round as “seed-1,” signaling plans to secure larger funding from Series A investors later. He also revealed that the company’s valuation for this extension was significantly higher than before.
Investor interest suggests NeuBird is on to something big.
Hawkeye operates by continuously scanning for alerts and alarms throughout the day. It attempts to troubleshoot issues autonomously, escalating unresolved problems to human engineers when necessary. The system leverages large language model (LLM) reasoning to analyze logs from any system, even custom-built ones.
“LLMs have encountered so many configurations that it’s rare for them to come across log messages they can’t interpret,” explained Rao.
Hawkeye integrates with customer systems in read-only mode, ensuring that proprietary data remains untouched—a crucial feature for banks and other organizations handling sensitive information.
“Hawkeye doesn’t need access to application data or transactional records,” said Rao. “We only monitor health metrics like alarms, errors, and CPU usage.”
NeuBird has already attracted customers across various industries, including automotive, finance, pharmaceuticals, and startups. Some clients, such as a small startup with just 30 employees and a single IT engineer, rely on Hawkeye to manage incident tickets. While some are still piloting the product, many have transitioned to full-scale use in recent months.
Despite NeuBird’s strong traction and high valuation, it faces competition. Startups like SRE.ai, Opslane, and Parity, backed by Y Combinator, have entered the AI-powered SRE space, alongside established players like Moogsoft, which offers automated incident response solutions.
Still, as automation tools reshape sales, customer service, and DevOps, NeuBird’s approach to creating AI copilots for engineers has drawn significant VC interest, making it a company to watch closely.
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