The former European leaders of payments giant Stripe have raised £12.6m for their next venture, Phoebe.
Matt Henderson and James Summerfield, formerly CEO and CIO of Stripe Europe, sold their first startup, Rangespan, to Google in 2014.
Phoebe is described as the ‘first immune system for software’. The AI agent platform aims to eliminate downtime by continuously monitoring and reacting to live system data, diagnosing emerging issues and generating code and infrastructure changes to resolve them.
The seed funding was led by GV and Cherry Ventures. Phoebe has also now publicly launched its platform, which is already live with engineering teams from early access customers such as Trainline and PPRO.
Henderson explains that their motivation for building Phoebe was experiencing the frustrations of software failures first-hand in past roles: “High-severity incidents can make or break big customer relationships, and numerous smaller problems drain engineering productivity. Software monitoring tools exist, but they aren’t very intelligent and require people to spend a lot of time working out what’s wrong and what to do about it.”
Phoebe’s breakthrough comes from ‘swarms’ of AI agents that search for evidence among vast siloed data to evaluate many different potential causes and solutions for a problem. “With Phoebe supporting the diagnosis, we’ve found that time-to-resolution can be up to 90% faster,” said Henderson.
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Roni Hiranand at GV said: “AI has transformed how code is written, but software reliability has not kept pace.
“Phoebe is building a missing layer of contextual intelligence that can help both human and AI engineers avoid software failures. We love the boldness of the team’s vision for a software immune system that preemptively fixes problems.”
Jay Davies, head of engineering for reliability and operations at Trainline, said: “Phoebe has already had a real impact on how we investigate and remediate incidents at Trainline.
“Work that used to take us hours to piece together can now take minutes and that matters when you’re running critical services at our scale. We’re excited to see Phoebe progress and help us operate efficiently.”