Edward Aryee described the motivation behind launching SRE.ai not as one big moment of inspiration, but as a slow accumulation of frustrations, calling it “death by a thousand cuts.” He and his co-founder, Raj Kadiyala, have created a company offering natural language AI agents capable of performing complex enterprise DevOps workflows, including continuous integration and testing.
Kadiyala, the company’s CEO, explained that instead of stitching together different low-code tools for applications like Salesforce, teams can now use context-driven, chat-like experiences that work across multiple platforms such as AWS, GCP, and Azure, allowing them to move faster.
The idea for the product emerged while the duo was working at Google Research and DeepMind. Aryee, who serves as SRE.ai’s CTO, noted they observed a significant divide between the advanced infrastructure tooling they had access to and the more cumbersome tools available to engineers outside of Google. They listened to their engineer friends complain about tedious tasks, such as untangling metadata conflicts, a problem that deeply bothered them. This led to their realization that the next generation of DevOps experiences needed to be created.
To address these issues, they founded SRE.ai in 2024 with the goal of providing enterprises with more modern tools to avoid problems like metadata merge conflicts. While other companies like Copado, Gersetm, and Flosum operate in the same space, Kadiyala stated that SRE.ai is differentiated by its ability to work across multiple platforms, from AWS to ServiceNow.
The company officially came out of stealth on Wednesday and announced a $7.2 million seed funding round. The investment was led by Salesforce Ventures and Crane Venture Partners.
Aryee detailed that the SRE.ai onboarding process involves an automatic setup where its tools connect with the user’s existing integrations. The platform can then be customized for specific needs, such as managing release pipelines, insight dashboards, and data monitoring. Meanwhile, SRE.ai agents operate in the background to monitor systems and flag issues requiring attention, including security risks. The tool provides recommendations on how to resolve these problems, which frees human IT teams to focus on larger, more strategic projects instead of tedious tasks.
Kadiyala characterized the fundraising process as one of “high conviction,” noting that the round was oversubscribed. The company participated in Y Combinator’s Fall 2024 cohort, which was instrumental in connecting them with their lead investors. The new capital will be used to hire AI engineers and Salesforce experts. Kadiyala said they are seeing strong early traction and are excited to build out their team to support new customers and extend the platform with new features.