Container observability startup Sosivio today announced that it closed a $4 million seed round led by Seamans Holdings, with participation from Superposition Venture Partners and Side Door Ventures. Cofounder and CEO Nuri Golan says that the proceeds will be used to support product launches and allow the company to scale over the next few years.

Containers and Kubernetes technology are entering the mainstream, with more than 35% of IT teams reporting having adopted them in 2019, according to a study from Kubernetes management firm Diamanti. Containers have the advantage of allowing developers to package apps and their dependencies together. But containers also present a monitoring and telemetry challenge. In environments with a large number of containers and microservices, over 50% of IT managers say that a single app request touches more than 25 different technologies, according to a VMWare Tanzu report.

Sosivio’s platform provides visibility into cloud-native environments as well as proactive failure prediction, automated resolution, and contextual analysis of signals. It observes data across layers of a cloud environment, facilitating process monitoring on every server. Sosivio can perform app profiling and observability without the need for agents or data-offloading. And the company’s AI engine correlates data, detecting malfunction sequences as they evolve.

“Liran Cohen, Sosivio’s cofounder and CTO, was the lead Kubernetes architect for Redhat Europe, working with some of the largest cloud environments for very sensitive and regulated companies, organizations, and governments,” Golan told VentureBeat via email. “During his time working with these customers and fixing critical failures after the fact — with hours and hours of human intervention from several teams in the org — he started to conceptualize a way to do this proactively with the help of AI. Adam Weiner, Avi Stokholm-Cohen, and I joined forces to help take this brilliant technology out of the ‘garage.’”

Container competition

Twenty-one-employee Sosivio competes with a number of container monitoring and observability startups, including Sysdig, which last year raised $70 million in a series E funding round. But Sosivio’s solution runs as a set of microservices without permanent installation, allowing even organizations in regulated sectors such as financial services to benefit, Golan claims.

“It only takes a few minutes of research to realize what a big opportunity the observability world offers and how big of a disconnect there is between the tools that are out there and what the customers really want,” Golan said. “When customers see our AI engines in action, predicting their crashes or even minor problems ahead of time, they are shocked. We’re pushing the bounds of what you can do with AI. This is not just tracing or anomaly detection, we built a platform that can actually predict and diagnose your issues before they ever materialize. Sosivio’s platform makes DevOps teams infinitely more effective.”

Prior to its formal launch in a couple of weeks, Golan says that Sosivio has been working with 10 customers including a software and IT company, a military unit, an online gambling and gaming company, a startup in the music industry, and an AI company. “Our design partners are using our platform in production environments which run digital applications and services we use every day,” Golan continued. “Imagine you run a large online sports betting company and your users experience delays when placing bets. Or even worse, imagine you are trying to transfer funds from your bank account and the app crashes mid transaction. Did it go through? Did it not? Both are real stories which we helped identify and solve in real time, prior to the predictive capability of our product being live.”

Sosivio’s latest financing brings its total raised to over $5 million.