It is not often that I come across a company where I ask the question, “Why hasn’t anyone done this before?” Then, when I realize what they are actually doing, there is a moment when I see the flash of BRILLIANCE that must have ignited, not just the minds, but the hearts of the founders. Faros AI is one of those companies.
Three years ago, the original creators of Salesforce Einstein, left Salesforce when Einstein was at its peak with more than 80 billion users. They had watched billions benefit from AI-enabled insight and recommendations in their CRM systems, but they suffered like the cobbler's children who had no shoes.
To understand what was going on in their engineering organization, they had to sign into multiple systems, like GitHub, JIRA, JFrog Artifactory, Jenkins, and OpsGenie, then do their best to try and integrate spotted insight from underfunded, embedded analytics. After years of attending meetings where engineering teams offered their best guess for feature delivery dates, they become frustrated with the inability to precisely forecast delivery and the insufficient data to accurately identify bottlenecks before or even after they occurred. So, the vision for AI-enabled software engineering intelligence was born and they founded Faros AI.
Vitaly Gordon, Shubha Nabar, and Matthew Tovbin, the Einstein team and co-founders of Faros AI.
The founding team defines their mission: “to make every company a world class software company.” In my opinion, they are taking engineering intelligence that was only available to companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, and giving that intelligence to companies of all sizes so they can operate like the best. World-class software companies have teams of people working on operations and productivity, the mission of Faros AI is to automate insight without the need of large teams.
Faros AI CEO, Vitaly Gordon, describes the companies last year as highly successful. They tripled their customer base, adding several large enterprise and Fortune 500 customers. They quadrupled their annual recurring revenue, beating expectations for both new business and expansions, and they tripled in size with several top performers joining their team.
Today, the company announced the closing of a $20 million Series A funding round, led by industry mogul, David Hornik and Lobby Capital. Salesforce Ventures, SignalFire, and Operator Collective 🔆, key investors from the seed round of funding, also continued their support for the team at Faros AI. This brings the total raised to $36 million.
In the words of David Hornik, a former lead investor in companies including Splunk and GitLab, “I have had the pleasure of investing in visionary teams for more than two decades and could not be more excited about partnering with the 3 pioneers who built the Einstein platform at Salesforce to bring ground-breaking innovation in AI to the software engineering experience.”
After leading the first $16 million round, SignalFire gave the reason why they continue to double down their investment in Faros AI, calling the company “the future of software engineering” and “the engineering bottleneck breaker.”
“In the wake of layoffs and budget cuts, businesses need tools to optimize their engineering operations more than ever,” said Ilya Kirnos, SignalFire CTO. “Meanwhile, teams want to understand whether new AI coding co-pilots actually make them more efficient, or whether they’re just gaining speed at the expense of code quality.”
Faros AI is an AI-native engineering intelligence platform for the complete software development lifecycle, empowering leaders to automate the integration of engineering data, broadcast multilateral visibility, deliver actionable insight for operational excellence, and streamline engineering with AI-enablement. While most Faros AI competitors focus on a limited set of intelligence, Faros AI covers the full gamut of software engineering including productivity, DevOps, HR, and quality; with plans to build modules for strategy, portfolio investment, compliance, and FinOps.
A sample dashboard in the Faros AI platform designed to provide automated insight for users.
To accelerate the delivery of AI-enabled insight, the company announced Lighthouse AI, an artificial intelligence engine at the core of the platform. Today’s announcement included generative AI capabilities so every engineer can ask questions in natural language and receive contextually aware analysis with detailed explanations. Because Lighthouse AI is built on both a rich set of metadata and a single schema for all the data, the results are accurate. In addition, this foundation makes it possible for the company to roll out a continual stream of new AI capabilities.
The comprehensive schema that powers AI-enabled insight within the Faros AI platform.
According to Shubha Nabar, Founder and Chief Scientist at Faros AI, the end game will be a complete guided navigation experience for engineers and engineering leaders “Instead of static dashboards, AI algorithms will sift through the data, identify trends, highlight anomalies, and suggest areas of focus," said Nabar. "Machine learning models will alert on issues before they disrupt operations, and correlate signals from disparate systems to help in causal analysis."
"Every aspect of software engineering will be transformed by AI in the next five years,” said Faros AI CEO & Co-Founder, Vitaly Gordon, “And we are building the platform that will help software organizations make that transition with confidence."
Ferraro Consulting expects to see continued innovation at an accelerated pace, with increasing value being produced by AI-enabled data management and insight delivery. Beyond insight, the platform shows promise for highly accurate automation of all aspects of software engineering and continuous improvement. We are at the beginning of an AI revolution.
Disclosure: Faros AI is a client of Ferraro Consulting.
© Ferraro Consulting, 2024