Resolve AI, a startup led by former Splunk executives, reaches $1 billion Series A valuation

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

The maximum valuation for the new round is $1 billion, the people said. However, the company’s actual blend valuation was lower due to the multiple transient structure. In this setup, investors bought some shares at a $1 billion valuation, but acquired the rest (possibly a larger percentage of the round) at a lower price. This novel investment approach is popular with some of the hottest AI startups these days, investors say.

The startup has annual recurring revenue (ARR) of about $4 million, two of the people said. The size of the funding round was not available.

Resolve AI and Lightspeed did not respond to requests for comment.

The less than two-year-old startup is led by former Splunk executive Spiros Xanthos and Mayank Agarwal, former chief architect of observability at Splunk. Their partnership dates back 20 years to their graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This isn’t their first collaboration. They previously co-founded Omnition, a startup that was acquired by Splunk in 2019.

Traditionally, human SREs were responsible for manually troubleshooting and resolving system failures, but Resolve AI automates this process by autonomously identifying, diagnosing, and resolving production issues in real time.

Automation addresses growing challenges for businesses. As software systems become more complex and distributed across cloud infrastructures, companies often struggle to find and retain SREs with sufficient skills to keep the systems running smoothly. Automating these tasks reduces downtime, lowers operational costs, and allows engineering teams to focus on building new features instead of constantly trying to solve problems in production.

Last October, Resolve AI raised $35 million in a 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 raised $48 million in Series A led by Kleiner Perkins and included participation from Sequoia.