Ciroos is a company that offers an AI SRE teammate, empowering site reliability engineers (SREs), DevOps, and operations teams to be superheroes. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Ciroos co-founder and CEO, Ronak Desai, to learn more about the company.
Ronak Desai’s Background
What is Ronak Desai’s background? Desai said:
“Before starting Ciroos, I spent over a decade at Cisco, most recently as senior vice president and general manager of AppDynamics, where I led the observability business for Cisco. Before that, I was responsible for the engineering of Cisco’s data center networking products. I started as the first founding engineering leader at Insieme Networks, a company that was bought by Cisco and oversaw its growth from $0 to $5B+. Ciroos is my fifth startup.”
“Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of building products that operate at massive scale and solving real infrastructure problems for enterprise customers. I have a passion for innovation and have 50 patents to date that are powering production systems used to serve billions of users globally. Alongside me, Ciroos was co-founded by a team with deep experience across Cisco, AWS and Gigamon. We’ve spent our careers serving the needs of the most demanding enterprises in the world, and we’ve seen firsthand the toil faced by teams that run mission-critical systems.”
Formation Of The Company
(Ciroos founders from left to right: Amit Patel, CTO and VP Engineering; Ronak Desai, CEO; and Ananda Rajagopal, CPO)
How did the idea for the company come together? Desai shared:
“Ciroos was born out of a shared frustration we’ve seen for years across enterprise operations. Despite massive investments by operations teams, identifying the root cause of incidents is still manual, slow and draining.”
“In fall 2024, as large language models with reasoning capabilities emerged and agent-based AI systems became viable, my co-founders Amit Patel and Ananda Rajagopal and I asked a simple question: If we had to reimagine operations for the future and build an AI system that reasons like a top-tier site reliability engineer (SRE) and collaborates with human SREs, what would that look like? That idea became the inspiration for Ciroos — a smarter, collaborative way to solve operational problems that have plagued enterprise teams for decades.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Desai explained:
“Our core product is the Ciroos AI SRE Teammate. Think of us as a Cursor or Windsurf for SREs, i.e., an agentic AI system that works alongside SREs and operations teams to minimize toil, expedite incident response and explain anomalies across hybrid, multi-domain environments. It dynamically assembles an investigation plan similar to how an expert human investigates issues, without any reliance on runbooks. Our Ciroos AI SRE Teammate integrates with existing observability, incident management and collaboration tools, and it can interoperate with third-party AI agents using either Model Context Protocol (MCP) or Agent2Agent (A2A).”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Desai affirmed:
“First off, we obsess about innovating on behalf of our customers, i.e., we are customer-led and not competitor-led. The most difficult operational problems for our customers cut across domains. That is why we have invested heavily on building a multi-agentic system that solves for cross-domain correlation. Second, AI is a journey and each customer has their own timeline. Decreasing toil could happen by automating tasks, augmenting operational teams or running in auto-pilot mode.”
“Each has its own value, and we want the operations teams to always be in control — that is why we call our offering an AI SRE Teammate. Third, enterprise operations teams are unlikely to change their workflows. That is why we integrate with a large set of observability, incident response, collaboration, and other enterprise tools to reason through complexity in real time to help ops teams get to answers faster, without major changes to their workflows.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since its launch? Desai noted:
“From day one, we knew that static runbooks and manual, dashboard-based ‘click operations’ weren’t built to handle the scale and complexity of modern digital enterprises. Our root cause analysis (RCA) engine has evolved to dynamically coordinate chains of domain-specific agents, each with expert-level skills, to diagnose and remediate issues. We’ve also added foundational support for integrating with third-party agents through open protocols, enabling customers to bring their own AI into the mix. It’s a living system designed to grow with the enterprise.”
Funding
Can you tell us more about your recent funding round? Desai revealed:
“We raised $21 million in funding led by Energy Impact Partners, with participation from prominent angel investors that include entrepreneurs, executives and CEOs of several public/private companies. We’re using the funding to accelerate development of the Ciroos AI SRE Teammate and scale our go-to-market efforts. The investment is helping us grow our team and expand the capabilities we offer. In the long term, we see this as a step toward delivering AI service as software to every enterprise operations team.”
Success Stories
Are there any specific success stories or use cases from early customers? Desai highlighted:
“Feedback from our design partners shows significant reductions in investigation times — from over 60 minutes to as few as three minutes for certain use cases. This and other customer feedback have been instrumental in shaping our product and validating that we’re solving a burning problem.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Desai assessed:
“We see two significant TAM opportunities. The observability market, which we’re helping modernize through agentic AI, is estimated to be $50 billion. But we believe the larger opportunity lies in AI-powered services that augment human SRE shortages and skillsets — a category we think of as ‘AI as a Teammate’ — where the TAM could exceed $250 billion.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you’d like to discuss? Desai concluded:
“One significant takeaway is that operations teams have been under-resourced and overburdened for too long. While developer productivity has skyrocketed in the last year thanks to AI, ops teams have been left chasing alerts with bespoke processes. We’re working to rebalance that by giving ops teams the support they need through an AI system that thinks, acts and improves with every interaction.”
