Traversal

Traversal grew out of university research on causal machine learning, carried over to the late-night problem of production incidents. Its four founders are Anish Agarwal, a professor at Columbia University, Raaz Dwivedi, a professor at Cornell Tech, Raj Agrawal and Ahmed Lone. Lone's own story, as the company tells it, is of being paged at 3:00 AM as a quant trader at Citadel Securities and wanting to end on-call for good.

An AI SRE built on a Production World Model

The company calls its product an AI SRE, an autonomous agent that does the core work of a site reliability engineer: investigating and remediating incidents. The platform builds what it calls a Production World Model, a continuously updated causal representation of a customer's whole production system, shown on its site as a graph of pods, hosts, services, databases and other components. On top of that model it investigates thousands of hypotheses in parallel to separate genuine multi-hop root causes from coincidental correlations.

Capabilities and where the work shows up

Traversal lists five capabilities: alert intelligence, incident root cause analysis, production support, self-healing and code resilience. Engineers reach it through a web app, Slack, Microsoft Teams, MCP and an API, and it connects to the observability tools a team already runs. It deploys read-only by default, without agents, schemas or sidecars, and supports bring your own cloud and bring your own model, so telemetry and source code stay inside the customer's boundary. The company says it never trains models for others on customer data. Traversal Workers, a newer product line, reached general availability. As one customer proof point, the company projected that at a top global crypto exchange its production support would reclaim more than 2,000 senior engineering hours a month.

Series B and recognition

Traversal announced a $120 million round at a $1 billion valuation, led by Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint and Khosla, with Sequoia doubling down. It has been named in lists including Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech 2026 and Redpoint's AI64. Its office is on West 26th Street in New York.

Key facts

Headquarters: 151 West 26th Street, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10001, United States People: Anish Agarwal, Raaz Dwivedi, Raj Agrawal and Ahmed Lone (founders) Products or Services: AI SRE platform; alert intelligence, incident root cause analysis, production support, self-healing, code resilience; Traversal Workers Deployment: read-only by default; bring your own cloud and model Funding: $120 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation (Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint, Khosla lead; Sequoia participating) Website: traversal.com