Founded by a deep bench of tech talent, including former Cisco, AWS and Gigamon execs, Ciroos.AI is launching with $21 million raised that will go towards growing its business and driving customer adoption of the company’s AI SRE Teammate, the upstart’s CEO tells CRN.
The upstart is also announcing that it has raised $21 million, led by Energy Impact Partners, which will go towards growing the business, recruiting talent, and driving customer adoption of the company’s so -called AI SRE Teammate, Ciroos’ Co-founder and CEO Ronak Desai told CRN.
Ciroos’ AI SRE Teammate lets overwhelmed site reliability engineers, DevOps and operations teams automate, augment and drive autonomous operations to cut incident response time by 90 percent, or hours, to minutes, said Desai (pictured above).
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The AI SRE Teammate, which uses a multi-agent system, will help enterprises initiate investigations into anomalies proactively, often before any administrator is made aware of an issue. The tool employs “human expert-like reasoning” to understand and correlate large amounts of cross-domain interactions and data to identify problems, the company said.
As modern enterprise applications become more distributed and complex, any outage will prompt a number of SREs and IT administrators that need to get on a call, while looking at multiple dashboards and a variety of tools across different domains, like networking and security, Desai said.
“On average, what we noticed was it takes [about] two hours to investigate and figure out where the problem is. At times, we’ve seen it takes days at times. We’ve noticed that at times, nobody noticed this issue that was lurking around for months,” he said. “We are on the mission to solve all of that.”
The tool has been built on the recently announced Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent 2 Agent (A2A) architectures and integrates with third-party observability security and collaboration tools from the likes of Prometheus, Datadog, Jira, and Slack, the company said.
“The goal is, and this is what we’ve built: Can I have a network agent which has expertise on your Nexus, for example. Can I have an agent which has expertise around your security domains, which could be a physical firewall or cloud? Can I build a capability with expertise on your cloud services? And then really having those agents built around those, which can work together,” he said. “That’s where it’s important, because you have so many different tools.”
The aim of the tool is to augment SRE teams by automating some of their work and freeing them up to focus on proactive tasks, Desai said.
“Giving that time back to the SRE is super critical so that they can do their best possible work,” he added.
Alongside Desai, the startup is co-founded and led by a team with extensive experience at Cisco, AWS and Gigamon.
Desai, who spent more than a decade a Cisco, most recently served as senior vice president and general manager of the tech giant’s application performance monitoring software arm, AppDynamics, until 2024. Prior to that, he was responsible for data center networking product engineering.
The upstart’s strategy includes partnering with early adopters and ensuring the platform integrates seamlessly with existing tools so that it enhances, not disrupts, current workflows, Desai said.
The tech veteran said that his channel-friendly company has already begun recruiting partners.
“Coming from Cisco, partners are close to my heart,” he said.
