Causely launches Causal AI for Kubernetes, raises $8.8M in seed funding

Causely, an artificial intelligence startup led by CEO and founder Ellen Rubin, announced today the limited early-access launch of its Causal AI platform for enterprise data. The company aims to revolutionize how businesses troubleshoot operational issues 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 Ventures, with participation from founding investor Amity Ventures, 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 wider range of IT problems and scenarios. The financing also brings the company’s total funding to over $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 are so many … thousand, or [maybe] even millions of interrelationships between the different microservices and all of the different components of the technology stack. And so there’s a lot of room for confusion and painful troubleshooting across 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 those from 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.

The early access program for Causely’s initial service is open to a limited number of DevOps and SRE users who are building and supporting apps in Kubernetes. The program will allow 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 that is focused on the causality problems, and going right to the heart of it,” Rubin said. “And this idea of causal AI, which is still an emerging part of the AI world, we are uniquely focused on it.”

Rubin also said that Causely’s platform is not 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 things as widely distributed as more business continuity challenges, security challenges, edge computing, IoT,” Rubin said. “These are all problem areas that we feel that we could address as well with the same core technology.”

Better cloud application management

The seed round highlights the growing interest in startups applying AI to improve IT operations and the market opportunity for these types of platforms. According to Aaron Holiday, cofounder and managing partner at lead investor 645 Ventures, Causley is creating a new category with Causal AI.

“Causley has the potential to bring forth a new generation or the next generation of what data observability will be when you marry it with that type of AI,” Holiday said.

With its initial funding and its 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 next year will demonstrate whether its Causal AI approach can solve the complex challenges of managing modern cloud applications and win over enterprise customers.