“It wasn’t one big lightbulb; it was death by a thousand cuts,” Edward Aryee said when asked what led him and his co-founder, Raj Kadiyala, to launch SRE.ai.
The company is offering natural language AI agents that can perform complex enterprise DevOps workflows like continuous integration and testing.
“Instead of stitching together different low-code tools for enterprise applications like Salesforce, compared to products built on AWS, GCP, or Azure, teams can now move faster with context-driven, chat-like experiences that work across all of them,” Kadiyala, who is the company’s CEO, told TechCrunch.
The duo thought of the product while working at Google Research and DeepMind. Aryee, SRE.ai’s CTO, said they noticed the divide between the infrastructure tooling they had access to versus what others who didn’t work at Google had to use. Their engineer friends lamented about tedious tasks, like untangling metadata conflicts. “It gnawed at us,” Aryee said.
He and Kadiyala realized: “The next generation of DevOps experiences needed to be created.”
So they founded SRE.ai in 2024 to offer more modern tools to enterprises so they can avoid issues like metadata merge conflicts.
Other competing players include Copado, Gearset, and Flosum. But Kadiyala said SRE.ai is different in that it works across multiple platforms spanning from AWS to ServiceNow.
The company officially came out of stealth on Wednesday and announced a $7.2 million seed round led by Salesforce Ventures and Crane Venture Partners.
Aryee said the SRE.ai onboarding process involves a setup where SRE.ai tools automatically connect with the user’s integrations. The tool can then be customized for a user’s needs like release pipelines, insight dashboards, and data monitoring. Meanwhile, SRE.ai has agents monitoring in the background to flag issues that need attention, such as security risks. The tool then offers recommendations on how to solve the problems. This leaves human IT teams free to tackle bigger, more meaningful projects, rather than being focused on tiresome tasks.
Kadiyala described the fundraising process as “high conviction” and noted the round was oversubscribed.
The company partook in YC’s Fall ’24 cohort, which helped Aryee and Kadiyala meet their lead investors. They will use the fresh capital to hire AI engineers and Salesforce experts.
“We’re seeing a lot of early traction; we’re excited about building out our team to support new customers and extend the platform with new features,” he said.