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Cause, an artificial intelligence startup led by CEO and founder Ellen Rubin, today announced the limited early access of its Causal AI platform for enterprise data. The company aims to revolutionize the way businesses solve 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 companies, with participation from founding investor Amity Ventures, and including new investors GlassWing Ventures and Tau Ventures. The funding will allow Causely to build its Causal AI platform for IT and expand its offering to a wider range of IT issues and scenarios. The funding also brings the company’s total funding to more than $11 million since its inception 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…thousand, or [maybe] even millions of interrelationships between the different microservices and all the different components of the technology stack. And so there is a lot of room for confusion and painful problem-solving among different people and teams.”
Causal AI for IT operations
Causely enters a crowded market of observation 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 manner.
Causely’s Early Access Program for Initial Service is open to a limited number of DevOps and SRE users building and supporting apps in Kubernetes. The program allows them to try Causely’s platform in their own environment and provide feedback and iteration as the company moves towards a minimum viable product and launch.
“We’re really the first team to focus on the causality issues, and get straight to it,” Rubin said. “And this idea of causal AI, which is still an emerging part of the AI world, we’re uniquely focused on.”
Rubin also said Causely’s platform isn’t limited to Kubernetes environments, but can be applied to many other IT issues and scenarios that require automated detection and remediation.
“We see opportunities in many areas, including things as pervasive as more business continuity challenges, security challenges, edge computing, IoT,” said Rubin. “These are all problem areas that we believe we could also address with the same core 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 at lead investor 645 Ventures, Causley is creating a new category using Causal AI.
“Causley has the potential to spawn a new generation or the next generation of what data observability will be when you combine it with that type of AI,” Holiday said.
With its initial funding and experienced team, Causley appears well positioned to gain traction, but it faces risks common to early stage startups, including finding product-market fit and early customer adoption. The company’s progress over the coming year will demonstrate whether its Causal AI approach can solve the complex challenges of managing modern cloud applications and win over enterprise customers.