The engineering world, especially those managing vast and complex infrastructures, often finds itself overwhelmed by on-call duties, significantly diverting focus from primary engineering responsibilities. This challenge not only places a substantial cognitive burden on teams but also devours up to 80% of tech firms’ resources and financial plans. Addressing this issue head-on, Cleric, a San Francisco based startup, has introduced a solution that allows engineering groups to tackle a broader range of problems more efficiently and swiftly.
Cleric has recently raised $4.3 million in seed funding, with Zetta Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley firm, leading the investment round. Contributions also came from a group of AI infrastructure angel investors, including executives at Google Cloud, Sysdig, Tecton, and Neo4J.
This financial infusion is earmarked for accelerating the startup’s research and development initiatives, particularly in its San Francisco and Singapore offices. The company plans to enhance its integration offerings and cultivate strategic alliances.
Advertisement
Revolutionizing Infrastructure Management with AI
Co-founders Shahram Anver and Willem Pienaar, who experienced the daunting challenges of managing sprawling infrastructures at Gojek, founded Cleric with a vision to automate infrastructure management using AI-driven solutions. The company aims to improve organizational reliability, boost productivity, and foster innovation.
Cleric introduces the world to its first autonomous AI site reliability engineer (SRE), designed to alleviate the on-call support burden from engineering teams. Operating around the clock, Cleric’s AI autonomously handles thousands of alerts at once, diagnosing issues within an average of just five minutes. Remarkably, it possesses the ability to make decisions and manipulate tools on behalf of engineers, protecting them from laborious investigative tasks.
A New Era of Engineering Autonomy
“We’re entering a new phase of automation where AI can make decisions and manage tools for us, allowing engineers to concentrate on tasks of higher value,” stated Shahram Anver, Cleric’s CEO and co-founder.
Willem Pienaar, CTO and co-founder of the AI Startup, added, “Our AI agent’s problem-solving approach is a departure from human methods. Just as AI changed the game for Chess and Go, we anticipate a similar transformation in engineering operations with AI teammates.”
James Alcorn, a partner at Zetta Venture Partners, expressed enthusiasm for Cleric’s innovative vision, “Shahram, Willem, and the Cleric team possess groundbreaking ideas on how language model agents will revolutionize engineering tasks like incident response and infrastructure provisioning. Zetta is excited to support these ambitious goals as seed partner.”
