Resolve AI Targets Software Reliability Crisis With AI Agents; Founder Cites Engineer Burnout at Splunk
Resolve AI is building autonomous agents designed to manage software system incidents and outages—a market opportunity rooted in widespread engineer burnout, according to founder Spiros Xanthos, formerly General Manager of Observability at Splunk.
Xanthos witnessed the problem firsthand: nearly his entire site reliability team at Splunk departed due to stress from constant incident response, despite being "smart, motivated engineers" who joined to solve interesting problems. The core issue, he argues, is that software engineering has become dominated by reactive firefighting rather than creative development. "The majority is keeping that software running. It's the hardest part," Xanthos said.
Splunk's complexity—the company made six acquisitions in two and a half years—created "a million ways things could break," making failures nearly impossible to predict. Xanthos found himself apologizing to customers' CTOs during crisis calls while his team traced problems through tangled infrastructure at 3 a.m.
Resolve AI's pitch: autonomous agents that handle the incident response work engineers currently do manually, freeing them for higher-value work.
The startup is backed by Greylock, according to the firm's portfolio announcement.
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