Ex-Splunk Leaders Launch Resolve AI to Unicorn Status with $1 Billion Series A
The world of enterprise technology is buzzing after news broke that a startup led by a pair of former Splunk executives has achieved a stunning $1 billion headline valuation in its Series A funding round. Resolve AI, founded less than two years ago, is shaking up the infrastructure software market by promising to take the human element out of the most grueling parts of system maintenance.
This is not a story about first-time founders; it is a story about deep industry experience turning into an explosive new venture. Resolve AI is the brainchild of Spiros Xanthos, the company’s CEO, and Mayank Agarwal, its Co-founder and CTO. The two men have a partnership that stretches back two decades to their graduate studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Before embarking on their latest venture, they co-founded Omnition, a distributed tracing startup that was acquired by Splunk in 2019. This history gave them a unique, insider perspective on the challenges facing large-scale software operations.
So, what exactly did they build that has investors racing to write big checks? The answer is “autonomous Site Reliability Engineering” or “autonomous SRE.” In today’s digital world, software systems are vast, complex, and spread across multiple cloud environments, making 24/7 reliability a constant firefight for engineering teams. Resolve AI’s technology acts as an “AI Production Engineer,” a system that can automatically monitor signals, diagnose the root cause of an issue, and apply a fix in real time. This closed-loop approach means the platform can resolve production issues in seconds without waiting for a human to manually run a checklist, dramatically reducing the costly downtime that plagues large corporations.
The Series A round that cemented the company’s unicorn status was led by the prestigious venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners. While the $1 billion figure is the one that grabs the headlines, the deal utilized a modern, multi-tiered investment structure. This meant that while some equity was sold at the landmark $1 billion price point, the remaining capital was acquired at a lower, blended valuation. This novel approach has become increasingly popular for the most highly-sought-after startups in the current market, balancing an aggressive headline valuation with investor prudence.
The new funds follow a strong beginning, as Resolve AI had already raised a substantial $35 million seed round in late 2024 from investors including Greylock, with participation from top minds in the field like Fei-Fei Li and Jeff Dean. This latest valuation positions the company at the forefront of the AI infrastructure race, though it is not alone. The space is becoming crowded with new players like Traversal also raising significant capital. The ultimate challenge for Resolve AI will be to prove that its autonomous system can operate safely and confidently at scale, performing fixes across thousands of services without ever causing a bigger problem.
The success of the former Splunk leaders underscores a larger trend: the most valuable startups of the coming years may not just be building new tools, but completely automating the work of highly skilled, in-demand engineers. For Resolve AI, the journey to revolutionizing how companies manage their digital infrastructure has only just begun.