A startup called Dodge AI Inc. closed on $2.65 million in seed funding today, saying it can help large organizations avoid hiring an army of external consultants to keep their enterprise software up and running.
Today’s round was co-led by Accel and the Google AI Futures Fund and saw participation from Schema Ventures, New Build Ventures, Antler and a number of angel investors from SAP SE’s ecosystem, the startup said.
Dodge AI says it’s trying to disrupt a $600 billion “enterprise firefighting” industry that has emerged specifically to maintain corporate software platforms such as SAP and Salesforce. These incredibly complex platforms form the backbone of most large enterprises today, and they require extensive upkeep to ensure everything is working properly to keep businesses up and running. Indeed, running enterprise software is an endless task, and installing it in the first place is only the beginning.
The thing to understand is that every enterprise platform is different. An organization might begin with a basic Salesforce deployment, but over the years it will evolve that platform with thousands of custom rules, company-specific configurations and workarounds, adapting it to its particular needs. This is why most organizations end up hiring large systems integrators such as Accenture Plc or IBM Corp., which assign teams of anywhere between 20 to 50 people to work specifically on their deployment, handling support tickets, upgrades and everyday operations.
Dodge AI co-founder and Chief Executive Rebhav Bharadwaj doesn’t argue that this model has failed, but says it’s not the most efficient way of doing things. Over the years, hundreds of fixes may go undocumented, while the customizations pile up and technical debt compounds over time, he explained.
After a few years, most companies find themselves utterly reliant on the systems integrator they hired to help them understand and operate their own software. “For a long time, the only way to maintain enterprise systems was to add more people,” Bharadwaj said.
But that’s no longer the case, he says. Bharadwaj’s startup has developed a “control plane” for enterprise software maintenance that’s controlled by artificial intelligence agents. It’s designed to be overlaid across systems such as SAP, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, so that the agents can analyze the deployment, get to grips with all of the customizations and configurations and so on. The aim is to automate maintenance going forward.
According to Bharadwaj, it’s capable of identifying the root cause of system failures, recommending and implementing fixes, and generally handling maintenance issues faster than any human team can do. Most importantly, Dodge AI documents all of the changes, exceptions and custom logic that’s implemented, helping organizations to actually understand their information technology infrastructure.
“Dodge AI gives enterprises the ability to continuously improve and heal their mission-critical systems so incidents can be resolved faster, technical debt can be understood and the knowledge trapped inside maintenance work can become the foundation for future transformation,” Bharadwaj said.
At its core, Dodge AI understands enterprise software installations by creating what it calls an “exception intelligence context graph,” which connects all of the business processes, enterprise resource planning configurations and legacy systems. Bharadwaj said that these exceptions are the key, as they explain why separate warehouses may allocate inventory differently, for example, or why one pricing rule overrides another. Dodge AI’s agents work to capture and document all of this logic and build a centralized source of truth that guides their maintenance work.
The startup claims it has already convinced several large enterprises to drop their human consultants and hand over the reins to its AI agents. It’s not naming these customers, but said it’s already handling hundreds of queries per hour, helping them to resolve issues that would normally take several hours, if not days to fix, within minutes.
For instance, it helped one customer to figure out that a warehouse loading failure was caused by an incorrect Goods Receipt Note within multiple systems and fixed the problem in a matter of minutes. In another example, it helped one of its customers optimize a SAP inventory planning process that was continuously crashing, making it 132 times faster than before.
Moving forward, Dodge AI wants to do more than just help enterprises to maintain their software. It also has its sights set on helping companies to accelerate their digital transformations. Many organizations want to modernize but are scared to move forward because they’re worried about breaking their most critical systems and applications. Bharadwaj believes that understanding the custom logic is key to preventing this from happening.
Accel investor Prayank Swaroop said application maintenance is one of the largest yet least modernized segments of the enterprise technology industry. “Dodge AI is taking on the work that keeps the world’s most important systems running every day,” he said. “By starting with maintenance, the team is building the context layer enterprises need before agents can safely operate in production.”