Sedai Closes $15 Million Round for Autonomous Cloud Management led by Norwest Venture Partners

The explosion of microservices and escalating cloud complexity drives funding and excitement for Sedai's autonomous offering 

SAN FRANCISCO, March 15, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Sedai, the first autonomous cloud management company, today announced that it has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Norwest Venture Partners with participation from Sierra Ventures and Uncorrelated Ventures. The round follows a seed led by Sierra Ventures and Uncorrelated Ventures and brings the total funding to $18.8 million. Sedai will use the funding for growth and today announced the opening of an engineering center in Kerala, India. The company is growing its development team to increase support for all cloud platforms and broaden its ecosystem.

Enterprises are under immense pressure to push new features fast to remain competitive, which means companies need to scale quickly and release more often. With today's cloud infrastructures, it is no longer realistic for organizations and site reliability engineer (SRE) teams to innovate while keeping track of hundreds of microservices and multiple dependencies.

"To effectively manage scale, companies are rethinking the 'shift left,' 'shift right' operations and automation that are slowing them down," said Suresh Mathew, Sedai's founder and CEO. "Sedai delivers SREs a platform that can act independently on their behalf, learn from them, and carefully measure the efficacy and continuously fix and improve right in production."

"We built Sedai to let every SRE and developer experience the same benefits of an autonomous system that has previously only been accessible to the large enterprise technology companies," said Benjamin Thomas, Sedai's co-founder. "With Sedai, companies no longer need to be burning out their SREs and can focus on innovating more with a lot less stress."

The Shift from Automated to Autonomous
Sedai is the first company to deliver an autonomous cloud management system into the hands of every organization. SREs can connect Sedai to their cloud in minutes, and the platform automatically discovers resources and intelligently analyzes traffic and performance metrics. Sedai then continuously manages production environments with proactive actions—without manual thresholds or human intervention.

Sedai's machine learning model detects symptoms early and prevents issues ahead of time. Its intelligent, context-aware system means that it can safely run in production and proactively improve the overall experience. Because Sedai acts as an intelligent co-pilot to the SRE, continuously monitoring and managing microservices, SREs can now effortlessly achieve higher levels of availability and reduce cloud costs.

"Sedai has created the tool every SRE dreams of—autonomous cloud management to proactively and safely address issues in production. The improvements that companies are seeing in reliability, uptime and efficiency show how beneficial this technology is," said Matt Howard, general partner at Norwest Venture Partners. "Suresh and Benji proved this approach at scale while at PayPal, and we are excited to partner with them in bringing it to the market."

"Global competitiveness by businesses of all sizes is being defined by the success of their digital strategies in this coming decade, which is driving strong growth in the $40 billion APM and digital transformation market," said Tim Guleri, managing partner at Sierra Ventures. "Suresh and Benji are the dream team, coming from PayPal and building an autonomous application management company that has exploded out of the gate. With 60% of all large enterprises projected to adopt autonomous technologies by 2024, customers like Fabric have already gotten on board with Sedai to stay competitive and scale. We are excited to back this talented team and look forward to the growth ahead."

Sedai Customers
Several businesses are already using the Sedai platform to manage their cloud environments and production applications ranging from serverless start-ups to larger enterprises going through a digital transformation and moving to modern cloud environments.

"Sedai watches over our Lambdas and proactively makes configuration adjustments depending on what we need to do—whether it's to minimize the latency or minimize our cloud costs."

• Kenneth Nguyen
  Tasq, Co-Founder

"Sedai helped us scale from having only one SRE supporting two to three customers on our commerce platform to now we can support 20 customers."

• Prakash Muppirala
  Fabric, Executive Vice President

About the Team
Suresh Mathew and Benji Thomas, while working at PayPal Payments Production, one of the largest microservices deployments, discovered that DevOps had allowed for faster deployments and scalability. Still, it was not without an increase in workloads and complexities. They knew that the strain on teams managing the thousands of microservices had become unbearable and that there needed to be a platform that could augment a team's knowledge and yet act independently.

About Sedai
Sedai is the pioneer of continuous autonomous application management. Sedai autonomously detects and proactively addresses potential issues in production, improving performance, ensuring availability and managing cloud costs. Acting as an intelligent autopilot for SREs, Sedai eliminates significant toil for SREs so they can scale and increase innovation cycles. Sedai enhances your Observability and AIOps platforms by proactively preventing issues. Try it for free at sedai.io

About Norwest Venture Partners
Norwest is a leading venture and growth equity investment firm managing more than $12.5 billion in capital. Since its inception, Norwest has invested in more than 650 companies and currently partners with more than 200 companies in its venture and growth equity portfolio. The firm invests in early to late-stage businesses across a wide range of sectors with a focus on consumer, enterprise, and healthcare. The Norwest team offers a deep network of connections, operating experience, and a wide range of impactful services to help CEOs and founders scale their businesses. Norwest has offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco, with subsidiaries in India and Israel. For more information, please visit www.nvp.com. Follow Norwest on Twitter @NorwestVP.

About Sierra Ventures
Sierra Ventures is a Silicon Valley-based early-stage venture firm investing globally with a focus on Core Enterprise and Next-Gen Technologies. With over three decades of experience and over $2 billion of assets under management, Sierra has created a vast network of successful entrepreneurs, Global 1000 CXOs, operational executives, and deep domain experts, providing a platform for entrepreneurs around the world. Learn more at sierraventures.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates.

SOURCE Sedai