InsightFinder Inc. launched in 2015 with a grant from the National Science Foundation to create an artificial intelligence tool that can detect information technology infrastructure issues ahead of time. Today the Raleigh, North Carolina-based startup announced that it has raised a $2 million round of funding to bring its technology to the enterprise.

The investment was led by early-stage venture firm Idea Fund Partners with participation from Eight Roads Ventures and Acadia Woods Partners.

InsightFinder’s namesake product, which is set to become generally available in 2020, uses machine learning to identify IT issues before they snowball into a full-blown outage. It employs data analysis techniques developed by founder Helen Gu at North Carolina State University. Gu, a professor with the university’s computer science department, is a former IBM Corp. researcher and onetime Google LLC visiting scientist.

InsightFinder identifies issues by looking at the different types of data generated by a company’s IT infrastructure. It analyzes both metrics, which express trends such as fluctuations in a server’s performance, and logs, or records of  specific events such as a hardware failure or application crash. InsightFinder accesses that data by providing connectors to more than a dozen popular monitoring tools, including Splunk and AppDynamics.

The startup’s AI algorithms crunch the collected information to glean problem patterns. When the software detects a technical issue that has the potential to cause an outage, it notifies administrators and generates remediation suggestions.

InsightFinder claims its algorithms can detect up to half of the outage-causing problems in an organization ahead of time. Plus, the fact that the product collects different kinds of infrastructure data allows it to provide other useful information for administrators. InsightFinder assigns health scores to a company’s systems that indicate how likely they are to suffer an outage, highlights areas for improvement and flags dependencies among those systems to help administrators see how technical issues might cascade.

The startup has so far signed up 10 unnamed large companies as early customers. They include a Fortune 500 cloud services provider, a “top five” bank and a telecommunications firm.

In conjunction with the funding, InsightFinder has appointed Distil Networks Inc. co-founder and former Chief  Executive Officer Rami Essaid as chief operating officer to help spearhead its 2020 growth push. Distil was acquired by cybersecurity provider Imperva Inc. earlier this year. Essaid is coming aboard with former SolarWind Inc. executive Greg Lissy, who is joining InsightFinder to become its senior vice president of product. 

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