Traversal: Bringing intelligence to observability

System downtime is the equivalent of a digital wildfire and can cost businesses up to $1.9 million per hour, while also damaging brand reputation, driving engineer burnout, and increasing customer churn as trust declines during prolonged outages. It’s the reason why software observability is one of the largest markets in technology and has produced numerous iconic public companies.

Yet, when things inevitably break, today’s observability tools leave engineers drowning in data and dashboards, and starving for actionable insights and answers. Consequently, system reliability under pressure boils down to frenetic guesswork, stressful war rooms and dashboard spelunking. Now, with more and more code within enterprises being generated by AI, systems are becoming ever harder to understand, and the problem more acute.

What if we could infuse intelligence into observability, supercharging engineers and enabling them to eliminate downtime altogether? What if we could leverage the power of AI agents to help find the needle in the haystack every single time, 24/7?

Enter Traversal.

Founded by MIT researchers Anish Agarwal, Raj Agrawal, Raaz Dwivedi and former Citadel trader Ahmed Lone, Traversal is building a new kind of observability platform powered by a unique blend of their expertise in causal inference, AI, and infrastructure.

When we were first introduced to the team, through a mutual Columbia University friend whom both Anish and Aditya knew (Anish is also a professor at Columbia), we immediately realized two things:

1. Building the intelligent observability platform of the future that tackles the most complex production incidents in the enterprise is a sophisticated AI problem, not an observability problem.
2. The team’s approach and individual backgrounds are exactly what’s required to build a category defining company in this space.

Today, Traversal’s agentic system automates root cause analysis in minutes, turning petabytes of raw logs, metrics, and traces into clear, actionable answers that help engineers resolve issues faster. The team has achieved incredible results by pushing the envelope on AI research and world-class engineering, culminating in frontier technology built on top of reasoning models.

Customers agree. Traversal is already reducing downtime at companies such as DigitalOcean (hear from CTO Bratin Saha), American Express, Cloudways, and Eventbrite, among others.

We’re thrilled to partner with the team and lead the Series A. We believe Traversal will become the intelligent observability platform of the future, eliminating the costs of downtime and allowing engineers everywhere to sleep better at night. They’re also hiring across the board — join them in shaping the future of AI-driven observability.

—Aditya & Mamoon