Startup Causely Inc. today announced that it has raised $8.8 million in seed funding to build its “causal artificial intelligence” platform and launch an initial service for applications running in Kubernetes environments.

Founded in 2022, Causely offers a platform that automates end-to-end detection, prevention and remediation of critical defects that can cause user and business impact in application environments. The company pitches itself as offering the first “causal AI platform” that eliminates human troubleshooting to enable faster, more resilient cloud application management.

The company’s platform seeks to address the issue wherein the IT industry struggles with interpreting vast amounts of data collected from various observability platforms and monitoring tools. The company argues that as the landscape continues to evolve with the proliferation of cloud and edge computing, the complexity and scale of applications are increasing.

Despite the rapid change, the industry is said to still rely heavily on human intervention for troubleshooting. IT professionals are required to respond to alerts, decipher patterns, determine root causes and identify the most appropriate remedial action. The process remains time-consuming, reactive and labor-intensive, adding to operational costs.

Causely’s platform addresses these issues by removing the need for human intervention from the entire process by capturing causality in software. With end-to-end automation, from detection through remediation, Causely says, it closes the gap between observability and action, speeding time to remediation and limiting business impact.

Unlike existing solutions, the company says that its core technology goes beyond correlation and anomaly detection to identify root causes in dynamic systems, making it possible to see causality relationships across any IT environment in real time.

Causely was co-founded by Chief Executive Ellen Rubin, the founder of ClearSky Data Inc., acquired by Amazon Web Services Inc. in 2019, and CloudSwitch, acquired by Verizon Communications Inc. in 2011. The other co-founder is Shmuel Kliger, the founder of Turbonomic Inc., acquired by International Business Machines Corp. in 2021, and SMARTS Inc., acquired by EMC Corp., in 2004. The founder lineup is said to bring together expertise from the IT operations, cloud-native and Kubernetes communities and decades of experience successfully building and scaling up companies.

“In a world where developers and operators are overwhelmed by data, alert storms and incidents, the current solutions can’t keep up,” Rubin said ahead of the announcement. “Causely’s vision is to enable self-managed, resilient applications and eliminate the need for human troubleshooting.

645 Ventures Management LLC led the seed round, with Amity Ventures LLC, GlassWing Ventures LLC and Tau Ventures LLC also participating. Causely’s first service for DevOps and SRE users building and supporting Kubernetes apps is now available in an Early Access program.

Image: Causely