In a world where software runs the show and ops teams are stuck playing janitor at 2AM, Traversal Inc. just stepped out of stealth with a $48M mic drop, and it’s not just another AI startup playing Mad Libs with “GPT” and “enterprise.” This team’s coming for the chaos that breaks prod and the pagers that break engineers.
Founded in 2023 by Anish Agarwal, Raj Agrawal, Raaz Dwivedi, and Ahmed Lone, Traversal wasn’t born out of some incubator daydream. It came from late-night debates at Columbia and MIT, half academic fire, half street-smart pragmatism. They weren’t content with dashboards that light up like Christmas trees but say nothing. They wanted something that thinks, not just watches. So they built an AI SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) that doesn’t guess; it knows. Think LLMs meet causal machine learning, running root cause autopsies like a digital Quincy on mission-critical systems. This platform doesn’t just file the incident, it gets under the hood, finds the fault lines, and fixes things.
It’s not vaporware, either. DigitalOcean slashed incident resolution times by 37%. Their platform’s clocking over 90% accuracy on high-impact failures across Fortune 100. That’s not a flex. That’s proof. The kind that moves markets.
And it’s no accident this company’s stacked. Anish Agarwal is an Assistant Professor at Columbia, PhD from MIT, former Amazon research scientist. Raaz Dwivedi holds a post at Cornell Tech, with stops at Harvard and Berkeley. Raj Agrawal is a researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. And Ahmed Lone brought the edge of high-stakes trading at Citadel into the ops world. This isn’t a team chasing trends; they are the trend.
The $48M came in two waves: seed led by Sequoia Capital, Series A led by Kleiner Perkins. Notable co-signs from NFDG (Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross) and Hanabi’s sharp eyes Bryan Offutt and Mike Volpi. And yes, Traversal incubated inside Sequoia’s walls for the first nine months; clearly, some serious conviction behind this one.
Enterprise software systems are buckling under their own weight. A single hour of downtime? That’s $1.9 million. Annual losses? Try $400 billion. This isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a systemic pressure point. And while everyone else is stuck wiring together dashboards, Traversal’s going straight to the brainstem of the problem. Real-time investigation across hundreds of millions of telemetry events. Slack-native alerts. No data sharing. On-prem ready. All signal, no theater.
This isn’t “observability.” This is intelligence. It’s not about alerting you faster; it’s about making sure you never need the alert in the first place.
Traversal’s just getting started, but the signal is loud and clear. The next gen of AI isn’t replacing engineers; it’s making them faster, sharper, and way more dangerous to downtime. And if you’re in the business of uptime, you might want to follow this team’s path, or get traversed trying to keep up.
