A team of enterprise tech veterans just raised $21 million to introduce an AI fix to some of the most painful software engineering problems: middle-of-the-night outages and other critical system failures that require immediate attention.
Ciroos, a new startup founded by former Cisco, Amazon Web Services, and Gigamon executives, just launched from stealth with its seed funding round, led by Energy Impact Partners.
Headquartered in Pleasanton, California, Ciroos builds AI agents that act as site reliability engineering (SRE) teammates. Traditionally, it can take a long time and many people to keep software systems running — and to find a fix when something breaks. When a website breaks down overnight or during a holiday weekend, it’s up to a team of unlucky, on-call engineers in triage mode to find a fix as quickly as possible.
Ciroos’s agents work alongside a company’s operations team to detect problems before a human is officially alerted, identify the root cause, and either fix them autonomously or help their human teammates fix them faster.
Considering that the median size of a seed funding round in the first half of 2024 was just $1.3 million, per Crunchbase data, Ciroos’s $21 million round is staggering in comparison. The startup’s CEO, Ronak Desai, told Business Insider that he and his co-founders connected with investors who agreed that enterprise operations needed a new approach, which AI agents could achieve.
“We saw deep curiosity from investors on the customer anecdotes we shared, and everybody noted our focus on cross-domain correlation as our point of differentiation,” he said. “Investors also readily recognized our execution track record, our relentless customer focus, and the deep experience we had assembled — all necessary ingredients to build enterprise-class products.”
Desai said that with its funding round completed, Ciroos will focus on hiring: the startup plans to staff up with AI engineers, full-stack engineers, and salespeople in the San Francisco Bay Area and India.
AI agents are booming in 2025, and Ciroos faces stiff competition from a multitude of enterprise tech startups that build AI teammates to help software and computer engineers. In May, no-code AI agent startup StackAI announced it raised $16 million from Lobby VC, and in April, AI debugging agent startup Spur announced it raised $4.5 million from First Round Capital and Pear.
Other startups offer general AI agents that can complete a variety of workplace tasks, including those traditionally handled by software and computer engineering teams. For example, the startup Artisan announced it raised $25 million in April, and Coworker announced a $13 million round in May.
Here’s an exclusive look at the 11-slide pitch deck Ciroos used to raise $21 million in seed funding.
