By Grace Stanley
Cornell Tech Assistant Professor Raaz Dwivedi has co-founded Traversal, a startup emerging from stealth this week with a mission: to transform how modern software systems detect and resolve outages using artificial intelligence.
The company has raised a $48 million seed and Series A round led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, with participation from NFDG and Hanabi. With headquarters in New York City, Traversal embodies the Cornell Tech ethos: bridging research, innovation, and real-world impact, right in the heart of the city.
“The company’s growth was fueled by all of us being in New York at the same time. The velocity you hit when you’re in person — I think it accelerated our development. And New York’s burgeoning startup scene is energizing,” said Dwivedi, who is also affiliated with Cornell Engineering.
Dwivedi credits Cornell Tech’s entrepreneurial ecosystem as a key enabler. “Cornell Tech’s support for external engagement made it the perfect place to take that leap,” he said. “From day one, I felt that culture of innovation and entrepreneurship — and it gave me the confidence to start something ambitious.”
Traversal is building what it calls an “AI SRE,” a 24/7 intelligent companion for site reliability engineering. The platform continuously monitors software systems to identify and troubleshoot complex production incidents. By leveraging telemetry — including logs, metrics, traces, and code changes — it pinpoints what Dwivedi calls the “smoking gun” behind outages. But Traversal goes a step further, identifying potential issues before they escalate.
“We’re quickly moving toward self-healing systems,” Dwivedi explained. “AI can detect what’s broken, identify the root cause, and suggest, or even implement, a fix within minutes.”
In practice, this can significantly reduce downtime and ease engineering stress, particularly at large enterprises with complex infrastructure and fragmented data. Traversal is already being used by Fortune 500 companies, including mission-critical cloud providers and financial institutions.
Dwivedi’s expertise in causal machine learning and reinforcement learning has been foundational to solving this problem.
“Root cause analysis is fundamentally a search problem,” he said. “At the heart of it, it’s about finding a needle in a very large haystack (or dozens of haystacks) with many fake needles everywhere. Given the recent advancements in large language models and causal machine learning, I think this is the perfect time to build a semantics-meets-statistics framework to solve this problem. And Traversal is doing just that.”
He co-founded Traversal with fellow AI researchers Anish Agarwal, Raj Agarwal, and Ahmed Lone. The team’s roots trace back to their time at UC Berkeley, MIT, and Columbia.
“We were all researchers, but this felt like the right moment to translate our work in AI into something impactful for industry,” said Dwivedi.
Grace Stanley is the staff writer-editor for Cornell Tech.
