Traversal raises $120 million at a $1 billion valuation

Traversal, which is building an AI system to diagnose outages and help fix them, raised $120 million at a $1 billion valuation. Co-founder and CEO Anish disclosed the funding in an interview.

Traversal began in January 2024. Anish, a researcher and Columbia University professor, said the company draws on causal machine learning: its aim is to identify cause-and-effect relationships in data when investigating the root cause of an incident.

Anish said Traversal focused on large customers from the outset, including American Express and Pepsi, because the problem is especially pronounced in large-scale infrastructure with many observability tools and thousands of engineers. Traversal connects to code and telemetry systems such as Datadog and Splunk, and investigates abnormalities. Pricing is usage-based: customers pay according to the number of investigations run.

Anish said the product is becoming more than a tool for responding to incidents. Companies want to use the platform while code is being written to assess whether it could break in production, and when alerts are created. Coding agents are becoming some of its biggest users, he said: they query Traversal to find out whether a deployment could cause an outage or security exposure.

Anish also tied companies’ heightened anxiety to the fact that reliability failures and security incidents can produce similar symptoms, such as users being unable to log in or a slow website. In his view, coding agents reduce the context available within companies, while security patches themselves introduce changes that can lead to further incidents.