NeuBird Raises $22M from Mayfield to Bring the First AI ITOps Engineer to the Enterprise

NeuBird, a first-of-its-kind cloud-based generative operations platform for enterprises, today announced a $22M seed round led by Mayfield. NeuBird’s technology, dubbed Hawkeye, acts as an AI ITOps engineer, enabling enterprise IT, DevOps, and site reliability operations teams to quickly identify and resolve software and infrastructure issues in real-time. NeuBird’s generative AI for operations platform allows businesses to make critical decisions faster, from days to minutes, and allows for faster adoption and deployment of new technology, features, and products without the worry of business impact.

A complex technology stack and labor shortages
Enterprises depend on a growing array of software, from cloud services to databases to custom applications. IT teams are overwhelmed by unmanageable volumes of data and the extensive time needed for system management and debugging. This slows innovation and takes up 30% of technology budgets as teams navigate through uncorrelated data sources and predetermined dashboards to identify and resolve issues.

On top of that, the U.S. is facing a labor shortage issue. As of February 2024, 40% of job openings within professional and business services remain unfulfilled. There are 9.5 million job openings in the U.S., but only 6.5 million unemployed workers.

Bringing Generative AI into operations with the birth of an AI workforce
Neubird is solving for this breaking point by launching an AI ITOps engineer named Hawkeye. Powered by generative AI, Hawkeye works alongside a company’s human workforce to pinpoint the root causes of software issues. Hawkeye is augmented with knowledge about specific IT scenarios and how to solve them. Using Hawkeye, IT and SRE operations teams can focus on deploying new technology faster without worrying about diagnosing and resolving integration and scaling issues.

“This is not about replacing humans; human effort needed to keep up with the complexity in the modern software stack has come to a breaking point, and we saw the need for an immediate solution,” said Goutham (Gou) Rao, CEO and co-founder of NeuBird. "We’re setting a new standard for IT operations and real-time response and resolutions using generative AI and cognitive models, or as we call it, GenOps. Our GenAI-powered ITOps engineer will supplement the human workforce so that enterprises can scale IT operations without being limited by the scarcity in bandwidth of skilled talent.”

How Hawkeye works
An e-commerce company may notice that its website is performing poorly at populating shopping cart suggestions. Traditionally, this would require assembling a cross-functional team involving IT, web developers, and data analysts to investigate the issue, a process that can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. Using NeuBird, the same company can simply ask, “Why is my website running slow?” and “How can I resolve that?” NeuBird’s Hawkeye will diagnose the issue, contextualize potential reasons for the problem, share steps needed to resolve it, and even write code to fix the issue.

“Led by repeat founders with proven success, NeuBird is a pioneer in our ‘cognition-as-a-service’ (CaaS) investments and harnesses gen AI to provide an AI ITOps engineer for instant solutions and real-time decision-making at scale while mimicking human behavior. Think of it as an AI teammate who takes care of automated IT ops actions so talented team members can focus on more important business tasks – a cognitive decision-making ‘superpower,’” said Navin Chaddha, managing partner at Mayfield.

NeuBird’s Hawkeye is built on three key differentiators that set it apart:

• Causality: By scouring through a vast amount of data efficiently and quickly, Hawkeye instantly pinpoints the cause of operational issues, removing the guesswork from IT diagnostics.

• Collaborative: Mimicking human-like interaction, Hawkeye works alongside users via a chat-like interface to uncover and resolve problems. Its proactive, conversational approach extracts more information from operations, facilitating a deeper understanding of complex systems.

• Conclusive: Unlike conventional analytics tools, Hawkeye delivers actionable solutions, offering a definitive path to resolve issues that today’s analytics cannot provide.

“I can attest firsthand to the complexity of the modern IT stack,” said Justin Fitzhugh, vice president of engineering at Snowflake. “The time it takes to root cause and solve an issue is about the most important concern for anyone leading IT operations. Generative AI companies like NeuBird are an absolute necessity as we prepare ourselves for the next decade.”

NeuBird was founded by Goutham Rao and Vinod Jayaraman. Prior to starting NeuBird, Rao and Jayaraman co-founded Portworx, which was later acquired by Pure Storage. Rao also co-founded Ocarina Networks, acquired by Dell, and Net6, acquired by Citrix.

NeuBird’s Hawkeye will be available later this year. To join the waitlist, please visit NeuBird.ai.

About NeuBird
Founded by Mayfield-backed serial entrepreneurs, NeuBird is pioneering the use of generative AI for IT operations to address the scarcity in skilled human talent in keeping up with an increasingly complex modern technology stack. By simplifying complex data analysis and offering actionable insights in real-time, NeuBird empowers companies to innovate faster and more effectively. For more information, visit neubird.ai.

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