The Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint and Khosla-backed startup is building AI agents that investigate production outages, identify their causes and help engineers keep increasingly complex software running.
Traversal has raised $120 million in a Series B at a $1 billion valuation, becoming one of the latest AI infrastructure startups to reach unicorn status.
Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint Ventures and Khosla Ventures co-led the financing, announced November 3. Sequoia Capital, Battery Ventures and Amex Ventures also participated.
The New York-based company develops AI agents for site reliability engineering, the work of keeping software applications and infrastructure operational.
Its premise is straightforward: AI is helping developers write and deploy code faster, but the growing volume and complexity of software is making production failures harder to investigate.
Traversal wants to automate that investigation process.
The AI Engineer That Investigates Outages
When an enterprise application fails, engineers traditionally examine logs, metrics, alerts and infrastructure changes to understand what went wrong.
That process can involve thousands of services and vast amounts of technical data.
Traversal uses AI agents to investigate those signals, reconstruct how systems interact and identify potential root causes.
Its technology combines a continuously updated representation of production infrastructure with a causal search engine that evaluates possible explanations for failures.
The company recently introduced Traversal Workers, autonomous agents that begin investigating when an anomaly or incident is detected, rather than waiting for an engineer to initiate the process.
Through its Model Context Protocol integration, Traversal also aims to make information from live production environments available to coding agents.
The longer-term goal is software that can identify, diagnose, repair and eventually prevent some production failures with less human intervention.
Revenue Growth and Enterprise Adoption
Traversal has reported rapid commercial expansion.
According to figures shared with Forbes, its annual recurring revenue increased ninefold over the preceding six months, although the company did not disclose an absolute revenue figure.
Its AI agents conducted more than 150,000 investigations in the most recent quarter.
Customers include Nubank, Harvey, PepsiCo, DigitalOcean and American Express.
The company's adoption reflects a growing operational challenge for enterprises deploying AI-assisted software development.
More code can create additional complexity, dependencies and failure scenarios, increasing the amount of engineering work required after deployment.
For Traversal, that creates demand for systems capable of understanding production environments rather than simply generating code.
Four Founders With Deep AI Research Backgrounds
Traversal was founded by Anish Agarwal, Raj Agrawal, Raaz Dwivedi and Ahmed Lone.
Agarwal, the company's CEO, and Agrawal earned PhDs at MIT. Dwivedi earned his doctorate at UC Berkeley, while Lone previously worked in quantitative trading at Citadel Securities.
Agarwal and Dwivedi have also held academic positions at Columbia University and Cornell Tech.
The founding team built Traversal around research in causal machine learning, reasoning and complex systems.
The company emerged from stealth in June 2025, announcing $48 million in combined seed and Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.
Its latest round brings total disclosed funding to approximately $173 million, including a strategic investment from Amex Ventures.
The Challenge of Autonomous Production
Traversal operates in a market where mistakes can be expensive.
A system that incorrectly identifies the cause of an outage could delay recovery, while an agent authorized to make infrastructure changes could create additional failures.
Reliability, observability and human oversight will remain critical as the company expands from recommending solutions toward more autonomous remediation.
Traversal has not disclosed its gross margins, profitability or absolute annual recurring revenue.
The $120 million investment gives the company additional resources to hire engineers, expand sales and develop its AI systems.
Its ambition is to build the operational counterpart to AI coding assistants: technology that not only helps companies create software faster, but also keeps that software running.
Sources: Traversal announcement · Forbes · The Next Web