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Causally, an AI startup led by CEO and founder Ellen Rubin, today announced the limited early access launch of its Causal AI platform for enterprise data. The company aims to revolutionize the way enterprises troubleshoot operational problems and manage application performance using Causal AI technology.
The company also announced today that it has raised $8.8 million in seed funding led by 645 businesses, with founding investor Amity Ventures participating, and including new investors GlassWing Ventures and Tau Ventures. The funding will enable Causely to build its Causal AI platform for IT and expand its offerings to a broader range of IT problems and scenarios. The funding also brings the company’s total funding to more than $11 million since it was founded in 2022.
In an exclusive interview with VentureBeat, Rubin said, “We feel like there’s a lot of pain, there’s so much complexity, there’s so many…thousands, or (maybe) even millions, of interrelationships between different microservices and all the different components of the technology stack. And so there’s a lot of room for confusion and painful problem solving between different people and teams.”
Causal AI for IT Operations
Causely is entering a crowded market of observability and monitoring tools for cloud-native applications, such as DataDog, New Relic, Splunk, and others. However, Causely claims to have a unique value proposition and differentiation by focusing on causality, not correlation, and capturing it in software in an automated way.
Causely’s Early Access Program for Initial Service is open to a limited number of DevOps and SRE users who are building and supporting apps on Kubernetes. The program will allow them to experience Causely’s platform in their own environment and provide feedback and iteration as the company moves toward a minimum viable product and launch.
“We really are the first team that focuses on causality issues and goes straight to the heart,” said Rubin. “And this idea of causal AI, which is still an emerging part of the AI world, we uniquely focus on it.”
Rubin also said that Causely’s platform isn’t limited to Kubernetes environments, but can be applied to many other IT problems and scenarios that require automated detection and remediation.
“We see opportunities in many areas that could include broadly distributed things like more business continuity challenges, security challenges, edge computing, IoT,” Rubin said. “These are all problem areas that we believe we can address even with the same underlying technology.”
Better management of cloud applications
The seed round highlights the growing interest in startups applying AI to improve IT operations and the market opportunities for these types of platforms. According to Aaron Holiday, co-founder and managing partner of lead investor 645 Ventures, Causley is creating a new category using Causal AI.
“Causley has the potential to produce a new generation or the next generation of what data observability will be when you marry it with that kind of AI,” Holiday said.
With its seed funding and experienced team, Causley appears well-positioned to gain traction, but faces risks common to early-stage startups, including finding product-market fit and early customer adoption. The company’s progress over the next year will demonstrate whether its causal AI approach can solve the complex challenges of managing modern cloud applications and win over enterprise customers.
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