"This wasn't a sudden eureka moment, but rather the culmination of accumulated frustrations," said Edward Aye when asked what motivated him and co-founder Raj Kadiyala to launch SRE.ai.

The company offers natural language AI agents capable of executing complex enterprise DevOps workflows, including continuous integration and testing.

"Rather than piecing together different low-code tools for enterprise applications like Salesforce, or building products based on AWS, GCP, or Azure, teams can now improve efficiency through cross-platform, context-driven chat-like experiences," said CEO Kadiyala in an interview with TechCrunch.

The two founders conceived the idea for this product while working at Google Research and DeepMind. SRE.ai CTO Aye noted they observed a significant gap between the infrastructure tools they had access to and those used by people outside of Google. Their engineer friends frequently complained about tedious tasks, such as resolving metadata conflicts. "This really struck a chord with us," Aye said.

He and Kadiyala realized that "the next generation of DevOps experience desperately needed to be reimagined."

Consequently, they founded SRE.ai in 2024 with the goal of providing enterprises with more modern tools to help avoid issues like metadata merge conflicts.

Other competitors in this space include Copado, Gerstem, and Flosum. However, Kadiyala states that SRE.ai's differentiator lies in its ability to operate across multiple platforms, covering systems ranging from AWS to ServiceNow.

On Wednesday, the company officially emerged from stealth mode and announced the completion of a $7.2 million seed funding round, led by Salesforce Ventures and Crane Venture Partners.

According to Aye, SRE.ai's onboarding process includes a setup phase where its tools automatically connect with users' various integrated systems. Subsequently, the tools can be customized according to user needs, such as building release processes, generating insight dashboards, and data monitoring capabilities. Meanwhile, SRE.ai's agents continuously monitor in the background, flagging issues that require attention (such as security risks) and providing resolution recommendations. This allows human IT teams to break free from tedious tasks and focus on more important and meaningful projects.

Kadiyala described the fundraising process as having "highly aligned conviction" and noted that the round was oversubscribed.

The company participated in Y Combinator's Fall 2024 batch, which helped Aye and Kadiyala connect with the lead investors. They plan to use the new funding to hire AI engineers and Salesforce specialists.

"We're seeing a lot of early positive feedback, and we're very excited about expanding our team to support new customers and adding new features to the platform," he said.