NeuBird, a startup founded by veterans of cloud-native storage startup Portworx, has raised a $22.5 million seed extension round led by Microsoft's venture fund M12. The investment comes on top of a $22 million seed round raised in April, bringing the company's total valuation to over $100 million.

The funding will help NeuBird expand its AI-powered site reliability engineering (SRE) solution, Hawkeye, which automates IT site reliability operations tasks. Hawkeye uses large language models (LLMs) to identify, diagnose, and resolve issues, freeing human engineers to focus on more strategic work.

NeuBird's founders, Goutham Rao and Vinod Jayaraman, are well-versed in the IT challenges faced by today's enterprises, having sold Portworx to PureStorage for $370 million. They recognized the need for AI-powered SRE solutions to address the increasing complexity of modern IT stacks and the shortage of skilled site reliability engineers.

Hawkeye works by tapping into all systems in a read-only mode, analyzing logs, and identifying issues. It can troubleshoot problems and escalate incidents to human engineers when necessary. The solution is particularly appealing to organizations that must safeguard personally identifiable information, such as banks and financial institutions.

NeuBird has already gained traction with customers ranging from large car manufacturers to startups, with many moving from pilot to production mode in recent months. The company's success has attracted significant investor interest, with Mayfield, Stepstone Group, and Prosperity7 Ventures participating in the latest funding round.

While NeuBird is not the only startup working on AI-powered SRE tasks, its valuation and funding suggest that it is a leader in the space. The company's approach has been likened to "copilots" or "teammates" that augment human capabilities, a trend that is expected to expand to other developer and DevOps functions.

The partnership with Microsoft's M12 is also significant, given that many of NeuBird's customers run on Azure cloud. The investment could help the company bring its solution to a larger market and further establish its position in the AI-powered SRE space.

With its latest funding round, NeuBird is poised to continue its growth and innovation in the AI-powered SRE space. As the company looks to raise larger funding from traditional Series A investors in the future, it is clear that NeuBird is one to watch in the tech industry.