In an industry where digital downtime can translate to millions in lost revenue, the immense pressure on Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) to maintain flawless service has reached a critical point. Startup Cleric has officially launched from stealth to address this challenge, unveiling a sophisticated artificial intelligence agent designed to function as an AI-powered SRE. This debut is bolstered by a significant $9.8 million funding round, co-led by prominent venture capital firms Vertex Ventures US and Zetta Venture Partners. The company’s core mission is to alleviate the constant strain on engineering teams by introducing an intelligent AI “teammate” capable of automating the complex and often tedious process of investigating production incidents. By shifting the burden of initial diagnostics from humans to AI, Cleric aims to not only accelerate issue resolution but also combat the widespread problem of engineer burnout, ultimately fostering more resilient and efficient operational environments.
Introducing the AI SRE a New Teammate for Engineers
The core problem Cleric addresses is the overwhelming signal-to-noise ratio that defines modern production environments. Site reliability teams are frequently inundated with a relentless stream of alerts, tickets, and incident reports. While many existing observability tools are adept at prioritizing these events, the subsequent investigation remains a profoundly manual and cognitively demanding task. Engineers must piece together information from disparate sources, maintain a vast mental model of the system’s architecture and its recent changes, and painstakingly trace issues back to their root cause. Cleric’s AI agent is designed to act as a powerful force multiplier, offloading this investigative heavy lifting. It is engineered to maintain a persistent, comprehensive “mind” of all relevant operational data, including logs, performance metrics, system configurations, and a complete history of past incidents, providing it with the deep context necessary for effective analysis. When an anomaly is detected, the agent proactively initiates a thorough investigation, presenting human responders with a concise, context-rich summary to resolve issues far more rapidly than conventional methods allow.
The methodology employed by the Cleric agent is crafted to emulate the deductive reasoning of a highly experienced human engineer. Rather than merely reacting to isolated alerts, the AI is capable of “reasoning about systems” in a holistic manner. Its process begins by correlating contextual information across a wide array of data sources to form logical hypotheses about the potential root causes of an issue. It then systematically tests these hypotheses against its extensive knowledge base, validating or refuting them based on available evidence. A crucial aspect of its design is a built-in mechanism to reduce informational noise; the agent only communicates its findings to the engineering team once it has achieved a high confidence score in its conclusion. These actionable insights are delivered directly into established communication channels like Slack, complete with direct links to the supporting data that led to its analysis. Moreover, the platform is built for frictionless adoption, integrating seamlessly with a company’s existing technology stack, including popular observability systems like Datadog Inc. and Grafana Labs, as well as incident management platforms such as PagerDuty Inc., ensuring that teams can leverage its power without disrupting their established workflows.
Fostering Human AI Collaboration and Proving Value
A central tenet of Cleric’s philosophy is that its AI should augment, not replace, the expertise of human engineers. The platform fosters a deeply collaborative environment where the AI’s analytical capabilities are combined with the nuanced intuition and “lived experience” of the engineering team. For exceptionally complex or ambiguous problems that extend beyond the AI’s immediate analysis, teams can engage with the agent directly through an interactive chat interface. This allows engineers to guide the AI’s reasoning, request deeper diagnostic information on specific system components, and effectively partner with the technology to navigate intricate challenges. This interactive loop is complemented by a robust continuous learning system. The AI utilizes confidence scores and learns from direct feedback provided by its human counterparts, ensuring that its accuracy, knowledge base, and overall effectiveness improve with every single incident it helps resolve. This symbiotic relationship ensures that the system evolves in lockstep with the production environment it is designed to protect.
The platform’s value has been substantiated by tangible results from early adopters who have integrated the AI agent into their daily operations. These organizations reported that the technology successfully freed up between 20% and 30% of their engineering capacity, a significant portion of time that was previously consumed by the repetitive and time-intensive tasks associated with troubleshooting. One prominent case study features BlaBlaCar, the community-based travel application from Comuto SA, which has been a customer since early 2025. The company noted that the Cleric platform not only accelerated the resolution of day-to-day operational issues but also provided deeper, more strategic insights that led to long-term improvements in overall system reliability. Maxime Fouilleul, BlaBlaCar’s Head of Infrastructure and Operations, highlighted a fundamental shift in strategy enabled by the tool, moving from a reactive goal of achieving “complete alert coverage” to a more proactive and intelligent one of ensuring “intelligent coverage.” This new approach allows the team to leverage the AI’s insights to preemptively identify and eliminate the systemic root causes of failures before they can impact users.
A Vision for the Future Fueled by New Funding
With its platform already proven in demanding real-world production environments and its strategic vision backed by significant new capital, Cleric was poised for a period of substantial growth. The successful closure of the $9.8 million funding round served as a powerful endorsement from the investment community, signaling strong confidence in the company’s technology and its potential to redefine the market for site reliability tools. Co-founder and CEO Shahram Anver articulated the company’s forward-looking vision, emphasizing that modern production environments are not static entities but are “living” systems that require continuous learning and adaptation. Cleric was designed with this principle in mind, built to evolve alongside the systems it monitors by learning from every event and every human decision. Following the announcement, the company outlined immediate plans to use the investment to scale its operations, enabling it to onboard a growing pipeline of customers. Simultaneously, the funds were earmarked to expand its San Francisco-based research and development team. A key focus for this team was set to be the deepening of the platform’s integrations with an even wider array of observability and infrastructure platforms, further enhancing its compatibility and value proposition across a diverse and complex technology landscape.
