Ex-Splunk execs’ startup Resolve AI hits $1 billion valuation with Series A

Resolve AI, a startup developing an autonomous Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), a tool that automatically maintains software systems, has launched a Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to three people familiar with the deal.

The nominal valuation for the new round is $1 billion, sources said. However, the company’s actual blended valuation was lower due to a multi-tranche structure. In this setup, investors bought some of the stock at a $1 billion valuation, but bought the rest – likely a larger percentage of the round – at a lower price. This new investment approach has recently become popular for the most sought-after AI startups, investors say.

The startup’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) is about $4 million, two of the people said. The size of the financing round could not be determined.

Resolve AI and Lightspeed did not respond to our request for comment.

The startup was founded less than two years ago and is led by former Splunk director Spiros Xanthos and Mayank Agarwal, Splunk’s former chief architect for observability. The duo’s collaboration goes back twenty years, during their studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. This isn’t their first collaboration; they previously co-founded Omnition, a startup acquired by Splunk in 2019.

While human SREs are traditionally responsible for manually resolving system failures, Resolve AI automates this process by autonomously identifying, diagnosing and resolving production issues in real time.

Automation is an answer to a growing challenge for companies. As software systems become more complex and spread across cloud infrastructure, companies often struggle to find and retain enough skilled SREs to keep the systems running smoothly. Automating these tasks can reduce downtime, lower operational costs, and free up engineering teams to focus on building new features instead of trying to continually troubleshoot production issues.

Last October, Resolve AI achieved a $35 million seed round led by Greylock with participation from World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li and Google DeepMind scientist Jeff Dean.

Resolve AI competes with Traversal, an AI SRE startup that grew up a $48 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Sequoia.