ManufacturingDowntime is a crisis: one that costs global businesses an estimated $400 billion a year and can drain up to $1.9 million per hour during major incidents. For engineering teams, production failures often feel like cardiac arrests. As Anish Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Traversal, put it: “An engineering team has two heart attacks a week.”
Fresh out of stealth with $48 million in combined seed and Series A funding from Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, NFDG, and Hanabi, Traversal is betting that artificial intelligence (specifically, a hybrid of causal machine learning and agentic AI) can finally crack one of the oldest, most persistent problems in software: root cause analysis. Their goal is to build an AI Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) for enterprise.
Despite decades of progress in observability tools (think Datadog, Splunk, New Relic) engineers still end up “dashboard dumpster diving,” frantically sifting through petabytes of logs and metrics to pinpoint why a system crashed. Agarwal, along with co-founders Raaz Dwivedi, Ahmed Lone, and Raj Agrawal, saw this problem play out repeatedly in both academic and high-stakes production environments.
