Software observability startup Lightrun Inc. today announced the launch of an artificial intelligence site reliability engineer.

It allows AI agents and engineering teams to create missing evidence dynamically without redeployments, prove root causes with live execution data and validate fixes directly in live environments.

As the adoption of AI agents and coding assistants has accelerated code generation, they have outpaced reliability. Lightrun argues that AI agents have shifted developer time from writing code to verifying and fixing issues and moved the development bottleneck to runtime, where behavior is complex and often nondeterministic.

AI SRE tools are not new, but Lightrun says that existing offerings are optimized for post-incident workflows and limited to relying on traditional, static telemetry that was already captured. When logs are missing, traces are incomplete, or execution context is unclear, teams are left to guess and engineers are forced into long reactive cycles of redeploys, rollbacks and manual validation.

Lightrun’s AI SRE is aimed at closing the gap found in existing SRE offerings by bringing live, code-level runtime context directly into the reliability loop. The new offering can safely interact with live systems via Lightrun’s patented Sandbox to create new evidence, test hypotheses and validate outcomes against real execution behavior. That, says Lightrun, transforms AI SRE from a reactive post-incident advisor into a trusted, runtime-verified autonomous engineer that ensures reliability by design.

The new tool is built on Lightrun’s Runtime Context engine and supports reliability across the entire software development lifecycle, from proactive issue detection during development and testing to autonomous investigation and remediation during live incidents. Using the service, teams can understand how code truly behaves in runtime, close visibility gaps without redeploying and resolve issues with confidence.

“AI cannot resolve what it cannot see,” said Chief Executive Ilan Peleg. “Lightrun’s Runtime Context engine allows AI to see application behavior at a single-line level of granularity, which positions us to streamline remediation for any software issues in real time.”

With Lightrun’s SRE, engineering and reliability teams can perform root cause analysis using new evidence generated directly from live environments, without prior instrumentation and validate code changes against real runtime behavior to reduce guesswork and avoid repeated rollback-and-redeploy cycles. The system is also designed to handle the “unknown unknowns” introduced by multiple AI agents operating across the software development lifecycle.

Lightrun is a venture capital-backed startup that has raised $115 million in funding across four rounds, including rounds of $18 million in July 2024 and $70 million in April 2025. Investors in the company include Insight Partners LP, Glilot Capital Partners LP, GTM Capital, Sorenson Capital, Accel Partners LP and Citigroup Inc.

Image: Lightrun