Traversal, a New York startup that uses AI agents to diagnose why software systems break, raised $120 million at a $1 billion valuation, a bet by investors that the surge in machine-written code will create a large market for tools that keep it running.
Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint Ventures and Khosla Ventures co-led the Series B round, the company said Tuesday, with significant participation from Sequoia and Battery Ventures. Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia were earlier backers.
Cleaning up after coding agents
Traversal’s pitch is that AI coding assistants have sped up how fast companies ship software but left engineers spending more time chasing failures once that code meets real-world systems. Its software builds a continuously updated model of a customer’s production environment from logs, metrics, code and deployment history, then tests many possible explanations at once to pinpoint the cause of an outage.
The company was founded by researchers in causal machine learning and reinforcement learning from MIT, Berkeley, Columbia and Cornell. It says monthly investigations on its platform rose to nearly 73,000 this year from 513, and that about two-thirds of usage now goes beyond root-cause analysis to tasks such as alert triage, release-risk checks and security questions.
Traversal plans to use the money to hire across research, engineering and sales and to expand long-running agents that start working as soon as an alert fires. Site reliability tools have become a busy corner of AI investing, with incumbents in observability software and a crop of startups racing to automate on-call engineering work.
