Microsoft’s M12 invests another $22.5M in NeuBird, 22 million months after the seed round.

Late last year, Gou Rao and Vinod Jayaraman founded NeuBird to create trusted web IT services and artificial intelligence.

After selling their old cloud startups, Portworx, to PureStorage for $370 millionThe two were well aware of the IT challenges facing today’s companies.

“It’s hard to find reliable experts on the site. There are a lot of challenges,” Rao, CEO of NeuBird, told TechCrunch. “It doesn’t help that the current IT stack just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Humans alone can’t keep up with this kind of change.”

To deal with the ever-increasing challenges, NeuBird built Hawkeye, an AI-powered SRE that can quickly identify, diagnose, and solve problems, freeing up human engineers to do more work.

After raising a $22 million seed round from Mayfield in April, NeuBird wasn’t looking for extra money. But when Microsoft venture fund M12 approached about funding, NeuBird wouldn’t say ‘no’.

Since many of NeuBird’s customers run on the Azure cloud, this partnership could help the company bring its solution to the mass market.

On Wednesday, NeuBird announced a $22.5 million seed round led by M12, with participation from Mayfield, Stepstone Group and Prosperity7 Ventures.

Although expansions are often done by companies that are not growing fast, this was not the case for NeuBird. Rao said he chose to call it “seed-1” precisely because NeuBird is looking to raise more capital from traditional Series A investors in the future, adding that its valuation was “higher” than previous investments.

Based on investor interest, NeuBird has something.

Companies can “hire” Hawkeye to monitor notifications and alarms continuously throughout the day. When Hawkeye discovers a problem, he tries to fix it, but when it doesn’t go well, it escalates what happened to the human engineer.

Hawkeye works using LLM logic to scan logs for any system, including custom ones. “LLMs have seen a variety of software development events so an LLM can get into a software program that they don’t understand is limited,” said Rao.

Hawkeye enters all systems in an automated way, which means that it does not store anything that its customers have. This is important for banks and other organizations that need to protect sensitive information.

“Hawkeye doesn’t need to see the software itself or the information about the software. We don’t even need to see your marketing materials,” he said. “What we’re looking for is health. Are there alarms? Are there errors in the logs? Is the CPU too high?”

The company has already managed to bring customers from major car companies, financial institutions, pharmaceuticals, and even startups, with a small workforce of 30 and only one IT engineer who can’t keep event tickets. While some of these organizations are still testing the product, many have moved to production in the past few months.

However, even though NeuBird has VCs throwing money, and significant valuations, at its seed, it is not the only startup working on AI-powered SRE projects. Y Combinator supported three of them in 2024 alone (SRE.ai, Opslane, Parity) and a few others also launched like Cleric. And major players, such as Moogsoft, also offer automated events.

However, if marketing automation and customer service mechanics, pilots, or teammatesas Mayfield’s managing partner calls what NeuBird does, it’s coming to many software developers and DevOps projects. And with this excitement from VCs, NueBird is one to watch.