Faros AI raises $20M to bring AI insights to software engineering

Faros AI, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup focused on software engineering, announced today that it has raised $20 million in series A funding led by Lobby Capital, with participation from SignalFire, Operator Collective, and Salesforce Ventures. The funding will be used to scale Faros AI’s engineering intelligence platform, which aims to give enterprise leaders insights into their software development processes.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Faros AI cofounder and CEO Vitaly Gordon said the funding comes at a time when demand for the company’s services are accelerating amid a broader push for efficiency and productivity. “With the recent market correction that happened, there are more and more companies that are starting to focus on efficiency and productivity,” Gordon said.

Faros AI’s platform integrates data from the myriad tools used in software development, from project management software like Jira to source code repositories like GitHub, in order to provide what it calls “multilateral visibility” into engineering operations. The company argues that while software has become increasingly complex, data about how it’s built has remained siloed in different systems, making it difficult for leaders to optimize their processes.  

“We’re on the verge of this turning point where, beforehand, engineering executives were not really challenged and were not really held accountable for how they used expensive resources,” said Gordon. “There will be a turning point when companies start to provide those metrics to their board and to their C-suite … more will want visibility and accountability.”

Building a ‘system of record’ for engineers

Founded in 2020 by three former Salesforce executives who built the Einstein machine learning platform, Faros AI has always aimed to help engineering leaders gain more visibility and insight into their operations and performance.

According to Gordon, the company was at least partially inspired by his experience as a VP of engineering at Salesforce, where he noticed that engineering leaders lacked data-driven insights into their operations and performance. He also said that Faros AI differentiates itself from other AI and software engineering tools by providing a layer of visibility across the disparate systems and workflows that engineering organizations use.

“We’re not replacing any of the tools that I mentioned [Jira, Github, CI/CD systems],” Gordon said. We’re just an additional layer that helps really to bring visibility across that toolset.”

Using natural language in data analysis

Gordon also revealed that the company is planning to launch Lighthouse AI, an artificial intelligence engine, in the first half of 2023 Q3. Lighthouse AI will let users gather insights about engineering operations from disparate systems, leverage natural language for exploratory data analyses, and eventually provide guided AI-driven navigation.

“Every aspect of software engineering will be transformed by AI in the next five years,” Gordon said. “And we are building the platform that will help software organizations make that transition with confidence.”

Faros AI has already partnered with some of the leading companies in the tech, financial services, retail and manufacturing sectors. Its customers include Salesforce, Autodesk, Coursera and Box. The company said that it has helped its customers improve their feature velocity, reduce their costs and optimize their resources by identifying and addressing the bottlenecks in their engineering processes.

“If you look at some of the most successful SaaS companies of our time, they are the single source of truth for a system of record for a specific function: Salesforce is sales; ServiceNow is IT; Workday is HR and finance,” said Gordon. “Engineering as a function is larger than all those that I just mentioned combined. We believe that the opportunity of solving that engineering problem is an extremely valuable opportunity in becoming the single source of truth for all of that data.”