NeuBird Inc. said today it has just closed on $19.3 million in funding in order to eliminate the “firefighting” role in information technology operations through agentic artificial intelligence automation.

Today’s round was led by Xora Innovation and saw participation from the likes of Mayfield, Microsoft Corp.’s M12, StepStone Group and Prosperity7 Ventures.

NeuBird is trying to position itself as a critical layer for enterprise DevOps, site reliability engineering and operations teams, many of which have found themselves overwhelmed by the complexity of multicloud environments. The startup’s aim is to boost the productivity of these teams while also relieving the stress many of them are under. It points to an internal study earlier this year that found that the average site reliability engineer spends around 40% of their time on managing incidents rather than building new features and infrastructure. It said this amount of “toil” has pushed many engineers close to breaking point, with almost 80% of enterprises reporting that on-call engineers are experiencing symptoms of burnout or alert fatigue.

One of the reasons for this is the standard monitoring tools they use to keep track of the infrastructure they manage. While these tools are functional, NeuBird says they generate far too much “noise” in the shape of alerts, telemetry signals and logs, which must then be looked at by humans to try and understand if it could cause problems. Co-founder and Chief Executive Gou Rao said modern infrastructure environments are like an “unrelenting flood,” and that the result is “alert fatigue, slower innovation and a disproportionate amount of skilled engineering time lost due to troubleshooting.”

NeuBird’s solution to this is the autonomous production operations agent, which functions as an “always-on” engineer that can assist human teams. Whereas standard automation tools follow rigid scripts, NeuBird’s agentic engineers are able to look at telemetry data and “reason.” This means they’ll not only identify when something is wrong, but also look at the infrastructure context and the level of network traffic to pinpoint what the problem is. It’s capable of both root cause analysis and taking remediation steps, without needing human intervention, the startup says.

Alongside today’s funding, the company unveiled a new offering called NeuBird AI Falcon, which is a newer engine that powers its autonomous production operations agents. This expands the capabilities of its agents, so they don’t just fix what’s broken, but also take proactive steps. They can now perform “predictive risk detection” and identify failures before they occur. In addition, they can also find ways to boost the efficiency of cloud environments, optimizing infrastructure costs.

NeuBird’s agents have been a big hit so far, helping to resolve over one million alerts on behalf of customers while saving them an average of $2 million on engineering hours. At the same time, customers see a 90% reduction in mean time to resolution, the company said. But the startup has much bigger aspirations going forward. The new capital will go towards expanding its platform’s capabilities and its engineering, sales and marketing teams, and also reducing deployment friction, so more customers can start using its agents. Cloud partnerships are a big focus too. After earning AWS Generative AI Competency certification, it has now joined the Microsoft for Startups Pegasus Program, as part of an effort to tap into the massive customer bases of Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure.

NeuBird’s biggest challenge will be to get around the trust issues that many enterprises still have with regard to agentic automation. There’s still a great deal of hesitancy to let autonomous agents take control of production environments, and the company will need to ensure customers have full visibility into their reasoning processes and deliver solid results if it wants to keep growing.

Xora Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer Phil Inagaki said he’s confident the startup’s founders will find a way to do this. “[They have] successfully built and scaled three enterprise infrastructure companies previously, and have lived the problems they are solving,” he said. “NeuBird’s production ops agent has demonstrated best-in-class results across accuracy, speed and token consumption across complex enterprise systems.”

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