The ex-Splunk founders betting AI can run your systems better than humans

Resolve AI is moving fast, even by Silicon Valley standards. Less than two years after it was founded, the startup has landed a Series A funding round that values it at about $1 billion, according to a report in TechCrunch. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, making Resolve one of the latest AI companies to hit unicorn territory early.

The valuation comes with a caveat. People close to the deal say it was structured in multiple tranches, meaning some shares were priced at the headline $1bn level, while a larger portion likely came in lower. That kind of blended pricing has become increasingly common for hot AI startups, letting investors get exposure without paying top dollar across the entire round.

Resolve AI is building what it calls an autonomous site reliability engineer, or SRE. In simple terms, it is software designed to keep complex systems running without humans constantly jumping in to fix things. Instead of engineers being paged in the middle of the night to diagnose outages, Resolve’s system is meant to spot problems, work out what is wrong and fix them automatically, in real time.

The company is led by Spiros Xanthos and Mayank Agarwal, both former senior figures at Splunk. The pair have known each other for roughly 20 years, dating back to graduate school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. This is not their first time building together, either. They previously co-founded Omnition, which Splunk acquired in 2019.

That background matters. Modern software systems are sprawling, cloud-based and increasingly hard to manage. Companies rely on SRE teams to keep everything stable, but there simply are not enough experienced engineers to go around. Resolve is betting that AI can take on a big chunk of that work, reducing downtime, cutting costs and freeing up human engineers to focus on building new products instead of firefighting.

The business is still early, but it is already generating revenue. People familiar with the company say Resolve AI is running at roughly $4m in annual recurring revenue. The size of the Series A round has not been disclosed, and neither Resolve nor Lightspeed commented publicly.

The company is not short on heavyweight backers. Last October, Resolve raised a $35m seed round led by Greylock, with participation from Fei-Fei Li, founder of World Labs, and Jeff Dean, a senior researcher at Google DeepMind. That lineup alone signalled that the idea was being taken seriously.

Resolve is not alone in chasing this space. Startups like Traversal are also pitching AI-powered SRE tools, and competition for customers is heating up. What sets Resolve apart, according to people close to the company, is how far it pushes automation, aiming for systems that act independently rather than just offering recommendations.

For investors, the appeal is obvious. If AI can genuinely replace or augment scarce SRE talent, the market is enormous. The risks are just as clear. Trusting software to fix production systems without human approval is a big leap, especially for companies running mission-critical infrastructure.