AI 'immune system' Phoebe lands backing from Google arm

An AI start-up which claims to act as an 'immune system' for software has landed $17m (£12.6m) in initial funding from backers including the ventures arm of Alphabet-owned Google.

Sky News has learnt that Phoebe, which uses AI agents to continuously monitor and respond to live system data in order to identify and fix software glitches, will announce this week one of the largest seed funding rounds for a UK-based company this year. The funding is led by GV - formerly Google Ventures - and Cherry Ventures, and will be announced to coincide with the public launch of Phoebe's platform.

It is expected to be announced publicly on Thursday. Phoebe was founded by Matt Henderson and James Summerfield, the former chief executive and chief information officer of Stripe Europe, last year.

The duo sold their first start-up, Rangespan, to Google a decade earlier. Their latest venture is motivated by data suggesting that the world's roughly 40 million software developers spend up to 30% of their time reacting to bugs and errors.

Financial losses to companies from software outages are said to have reached $400bn globally last year, according to the company. Phoebe's swarms of AI agents sift through siloed data to identify errors in real time, which it says reduces the time it takes to resolve them by up to 90%.

"High-severity incidents can make or break big customer relationships, and numerous smaller problems drain engineering productivity," Mr Henderson said. "Software monitoring tools exist, but they aren't very intelligent and require people to spend a lot of time working out what is wrong and what to do about it." The backing from blue-chip investors such as GV and Cherry Ventures underlines the level of interest in AI-powered software remediation businesses.

Roni Hiranand, an executive 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 pre-emptively fixes problems." Phoebe has signed up customers including Trainline, the rail booking app. Jay Davies, head of engineering for reliability and operations at Trainline, said Phoebe had "already had a real impact on how we investigate and remediate incidents".

"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.".