Israeli developer observability startup Lightrun Inc. announced today that it has raised $18 million in new funding and launched Runtime Autonomous AI Debugger, a runtime autonomous debugger based on generative artificial intelligence.

Founded in 2019, Lightrun offers a developer-centered observability platform that allows developers to debug their code in real time without the need for extensive pretesting or redeployment. The company claims its services provide unparalleled visibility into application behavior across various environments, including development, staging and production.

The company offers a “shift left” observability platform that gives developers deeper insights into running applications by allowing them to insert logs, metrics, traces and more during runtime. That, the company says, drastically reduces mean time to resolution and logging costs while elevating developer productivity and improving software quality.

The shift left observability mimics and automates the existing developer workflow for troubleshooting runtime issues by hypothesizing the potential root cause based on IT operations and observability signals. The service then adds dynamic snapshots and logs on the fly to specific lines of code using a dynamic observability software development kit, which enables line-by-line runtime debugging.

The cycle repeats until the root cause is identified. Lightrun’s runtime debugging generative AI models suggest potential root causes, validating these hypotheses with real-time production data gathered by the software development kit.

Notable customers include Salesforce Inc., Microsoft Corp., AT&T Inc., SAP SE, Advanced Data Process Inc., Booking Holdings Inc. (Priceline) and Industria de Diseño Textil, S.A.

The new Runtime Autonomous AI Debugger, available today in private beta, automates the entire debugging journey from the initial ticket to pinpointing the exact culprit line of code in the integrated development environment. The results liberate developers from the endless cycle of troubleshooting, it says.

The approach taken with the new service turbo charges observability and software debugging, saving developers from spending half of their time troubleshooting. In doing so, it claims, it cuts the operational mean time to resolution of production incidents to minutes.

“While billions have been invested the last year in IDE-based gen AI tools like Copilot for code generation, testing and QA, gen AI-based runtime debugging in the IDE has been the missing link,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Ilan Peleg. “Lightrun integrates seamlessly into the developer workflow — from code writing to production operation — enabling a complete, automated gen AI experience within the IDE.”

GTM Capital led the Series B funding round, with previous investors Insight Partners LP and Glilot Capital Partners Ltd. also participating. Including the new funding, Lightrun has raised $48 million to date.

Image: Lightrun