NeuBird, a startup founded by Gou Rao and Vinod Jayaraman late last year, has secured an additional $22.5 million in funding led by Microsoft’s venture fund, M12. This investment, coming just months after the company’s $22 million seed round, underscores growing interest in NeuBird’s generative AI solution for automating IT site reliability engineering (SRE) tasks.
NeuBird’s co-founders are no strangers to the tech landscape. Their prior venture, Portworx, a cloud-native storage startup, was sold to PureStorage for $370 million. With NeuBird, the pair aims to address the increasing complexity of IT infrastructure. “It’s very hard to find good site reliability engineers,” said CEO Gou Rao. “Humans alone cannot possibly keep up with this kind of change.”
The startup’s flagship product, Hawkeye, employs large language models (LLMs) to identify, diagnose, and resolve IT issues in real time, enabling human engineers to focus on strategic tasks. Hawkeye operates in a read-only mode, ensuring customer data remains secure—a critical feature for industries like banking and pharmaceuticals.
NeuBird’s growth trajectory caught M12’s attention, even though the company wasn’t actively seeking additional funding. Many of its clients operate on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, making the investment a natural fit. “The partnership with M12 will help us bring our solution to a larger market,” Rao noted.
The latest funding round also included contributions from Mayfield, Stepstone Group, and Prosperity7 Ventures. Although seed extensions often signal slower growth, Rao emphasized that NeuBird is bucking that trend. “We’re calling this round ‘seed-1’ to set the stage for a larger Series A in the future,” he explained, adding that the valuation for this round significantly exceeded the previous $100 million figure reported by PitchBook.
NeuBird has already gained traction with a diverse customer base, including large manufacturers, financial institutions, and startups. While some organizations are still piloting Hawkeye, others have moved into full production.
Competition in the AI-powered SRE space is heating up, with startups like SRE.ai, Opslane, and Parity emerging from Y Combinator and established players like Moogsoft offering similar tools. However, NeuBird’s rapid adoption and investor enthusiasm suggest it is well-positioned to carve out a leadership role in the sector.
The company’s approach reflects broader trends in automation, where AI copilots are reshaping DevOps and developer workflows. With its latest funding and strong market interest, NeuBird is poised to make waves in the rapidly evolving landscape of AI-driven IT operations.
Featured image courtesy of TechCrunch
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