Last year, Gou Rao and Vinod Jayaraman took a significant step by founding NeuBird. Their aim was to bring automation to IT site reliability operations tasks through the power of generative AI. Having previously sold their cloud-native storage startup, Portworx, to PureStorage for $370 million, they brought with them a wealth of knowledge about the IT challenges faced by today's enterprises.
Addressing the Talent Shortage
Finding good site reliability engineers is a daunting task, as there is a high churn rate in the field. The modern IT stack continues to grow more complex, making it nearly impossible for humans to keep up. As NeuBird's CEO, Rao, explained to TechCrunch, "It's very hard to find good site reliability engineers. There's a lot of churn. It doesn't help that the modern IT stack just keeps getting more and more complex. Humans alone cannot possibly keep up with this kind of change."The Hawkeye Solution
To tackle this increased complexity, NeuBird developed Hawkeye. This AI-powered SRE can quickly identify, diagnose, and resolve issues, freeing up human engineers to focus on more strategic work. In April, NeuBird raised a $22 million seed round from Mayfield. However, when Microsoft's venture fund M12 expressed interest in an investment, NeuBird couldn't resist. Since many of their customers run on the Azure cloud, this partnership has the potential to expand their market reach.Hawkeye works by using LLM reasoning to analyze logs from any system, including custom-built ones. As Rao pointed out, "LLMs have seen so many different application configuration scenarios that the fact that the LLM would run into an application log line message that it doesn't understand is minuscule." Hawkeye operates in a read-only mode, ensuring that it doesn't store any of the customers' proprietary data, which is crucial for banks and other organizations that handle personal information.
Hawkeye can continuously look for active alerts and alarms throughout the day. When it identifies an issue, it attempts to troubleshoot it. If it fails, it escalates the incident to a human engineer. The company has already attracted a diverse range of customers, from large car manufacturing companies and financial institutions to pharmaceuticals and even startups with as few as 30 employees and only one IT operations engineer who was struggling to keep up with incident tickets. While some are still in the pilot phase, many have moved to production mode in the last few months.
Competition in the Field
Although NeuBird has attracted significant investment and attention from venture capitalists, it's not the only startup working on AI-powered SRE tasks. Y Combinator has supported three such startups in 2024 alone (SRE.ai, Opslane, Parity), and other players like Cleric have also entered the market. Larger players like Moogsoft also offer automated incident response features.However, just like in sales automation and customer service automation, copilots or teammates, as Mayfield's managing partner describes NeuBird's offering, are making their way into many developer and DevOps functions. With the excitement from venture capitalists, NeuBird is definitely a startup to keep an eye on.
