Cleric Raises $9.8M to Expand AI‑Powered Autonomous Platform for Software Reliability
Cleric, a San Francisco–based startup building autonomous AI tools to automate software infrastructure reliability, has secured early‑stage funding that reflects growing investor interest in AI‑driven operations and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) solutions. Founded in 2023 by CEO Shahram Anver and CTO Willem Pienaar, Cleric’s technology aims to free engineering teams from repetitive on‑call investigations by autonomously triaging alerts, diagnosing root causes, and suggesting resolutions across complex cloud and production environments.
Cleric’s initial financing came in March 2024, when the company raised $4.3 million in seed funding to support product development, expand its research and development efforts in San Francisco and Singapore, and grow its suite of integrations with observability and infrastructure tools. The seed round was led by Zetta Venture Partners, a venture capital firm known for backing early‑stage AI and data‑centric companies, and included contributions from a group of AI infrastructure angel investors with expertise from major cloud, monitoring, and machine‑learning companies.
Cleric’s autonomous AI site reliability engineer (SRE) platform operates continuously, processing thousands of alerts and identifying underlying issues within minutes rather than hours. By integrating data from observability systems, metrics, logs, and configuration sources, Cleric’s agent provides evidence‑backed insights and actionable recommendations directly to engineering teams, often through familiar collaboration tools such as Slack. The company positions this technology as a step toward reducing manual toil, improving reliability, and helping engineers focus on higher‑value work like feature development and system design.
Since its initial seed financing, Cleric has continued to evolve its platform and market presence. In December 2025, the company unveiled its self‑learning AI SRE, a version of its agent that continuously improves by learning from each incident and human interaction, helping it surface more accurate insights and reduce noise in operational workflows. Early adopters have reported that the system can free up 20–30 percent of engineering capacity previously tied to repetitive troubleshooting tasks across distributed systems.
Alongside this product milestone, Cleric announced that it has raised a total of $9.8 million in seed funding after a follow‑on investment led by Vertex Ventures US, with continued participation from its initial seed investor, Zetta Venture Partners. This expanded funding base provides Cleric with additional runway to scale customer deployments, deepen production support, and expand partnerships with observability and infrastructure vendors, positioning it for further growth in the enterprise reliability software market.
The participation of Vertex Ventures US alongside Zetta Venture Partners underscores broader investor confidence in Cleric’s approach to AI‑enabled infrastructure operations. Both firms specialize in backing early‑stage technology companies developing category‑defining tools, and their support reflects belief in Cleric’s potential to transform how engineering teams manage reliability, alerts, and production incidents.
Cleric’s technology addresses a persistent pain point in software engineering: the burden of on‑call support and incident response that consumes engineering time and can lead to burnout. Traditional SRE processes often rely on manual investigation of alert data scattered across disparate monitoring platforms, which can delay resolution and obscure systemic issues. Cleric’s autonomous agent approach leverages AI to correlate context across systems, deliver root‑cause analysis with supporting evidence, and learn from each interaction to improve future performance.
As the company expands its team and customer base, Cleric plans to use its funding to support deeper integration with popular tools such as Datadog, Grafana, and CI/CD systems, enabling teams to adopt AI‑augmented reliability workflows without overhauling their existing stacks. The technology’s ability to deliver intelligent insights and operational memory — where past investigations inform future responses — is seen as a differentiator in a crowded observability and incident management market.
Cleric’s journey from its $4.3 million seed round in 2024 to nearly $10 million in total funding by the end of 2025 illustrates both the startup’s momentum and the broader appetite for AI technologies that go beyond code generation to address real‑world operational challenges. With backing from specialized venture firms and a growing suite of enterprise capabilities, Cleric is positioned to further influence the way modern software teams approach reliability, monitoring, and production incident resolution.
As enterprises increasingly adopt AI‑driven systems and infrastructure complexity continues to rise, tools like Cleric’s autonomous SRE agent are expected to play a role in reducing operational overhead and improving system uptime. The company’s continued investment in R&D and strategic partnerships will likely shape its trajectory as it scales its platform and expands its market footprint among engineering organizations seeking more efficient reliability solutions.
