Traversal Raises $48 Million to Speed Up Software Troubleshooting 37%

Traversal, a startup founded in 2023, has emerged from stealth mode with a significant $48 million in funding from its seed and Series A rounds. The company, which focuses on observability and site reliability engineering (SRE), aims to help engineers pinpoint and troubleshoot complex software failures with speed and precision. The funding was led by Sequoia in the seed round and Kleiner Perkins in the Series A round, with additional investments from Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross’s NFDG and Hanabi. Traversal's customer base includes notable companies such as
, , Cloudways, and several undisclosed Fortune 100 financial services companies. The company's mission is to stop software infrastructure crises and limit downtime, a critical issue for large organizations with complex cloud infrastructures.Anish Agarwal, Traversal's CEO, highlighted the complexity of troubleshooting in software, noting that it often requires extensive efforts from multiple engineers. He drew an analogy to a heart attack, emphasizing the urgency and importance of resolving such issues promptly. Bratin Saha, chief technology and product officer at
, echoed this sentiment, stating that even minor platform incidents can quickly escalate and impact customer experience and costs. Over six months, Traversal has helped resolve problems 37% faster, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing these challenges.The timing of Traversal's launch is strategic, as the tech industry is experiencing an AI wave that is accelerating the amount of code being written. This increase in code generation creates a larger surface area for troubleshooting, necessitating AI-driven solutions to autonomously troubleshoot, mediate, and even prevent complex incidents at scale. Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky noted that observability and security are domains that periodically produce big winners, citing companies like Splunk, Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic as examples. Traversal, with its focus on the intersection of observability and AI, is well-positioned to capitalize on this trend.
Traversal's founders, including Agarwal, Raaz Dwivedi, Ahmed Lone, and Raj Agrawal, are all academics who met during their time at Columbia University. Their late-night discussions about causal machine learning, reinforcement learning, and AI agents laid the groundwork for Traversal. Agarwal, who had a tenure-track position at Columbia after earning his PhD from MIT, was drawn to the entrepreneurial unknown and the uncertainty of research. This academic-to-entrepreneur path is not uncommon, with notable examples including VMware’s Mendel Rosenblum and Databricks’s Ali Ghodsi. The founders' academic background and commercial instincts have enabled them to solve hard technical problems while continuing to produce research in a compelling package.

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