Alerting for developers and ops teams may look like a solved problem. It's not exactly hard to notify an on-call engineer anymore. The real question is when to alert the right person, how to help them make sense of what's happening when the service goes down, for instance. For many - including Keep - the future is AI.

The company offers an open-source version that uses a rule-based system, but what is really interesting is its paid enterprise offering, which also uses AI models to reduce notification fatigue by deduplicating and correlating alerts.

The Y Combinator-backed company, announcing a $2.5 million pre-seed round today, uses AI to help ops teams manage and prioritize their alerts. The service aggregates data from any number of monitoring tools, prioritizes and manages alerts, then helps those teams diagnose the issue that woke up the on-call engineer in the first place.

"We saw that observability platforms became more or less a commodity. They unified features. They gave great access to metrics, logs, etc., " said Keep co-founder Matvey Kukuy. "So you can access this data, but it's really hard to interpret it — and especially interpret during hard times when something is happening. When you manage a large enterprise infrastructure, where something is always happening, you're likely dealing with 1,000s of events."

Co-founded by CEO Tal Borenstein and CTO Tal Glazner, keep was actually founded by two individuals who met 13 years ago in the Unit 8200 of the Israeli Defense Force, and they have been friends ever since. While Borenstein worked for Cyberbit - a platform for cybersecurity skills - and the compliance service Anecdotes during those years, Glazner was at Cyberark before reuniting with his co-founder at Anecdotes. They hired Kukuy as their third co-founder earlier this year. Kukuy was previously the CEO of Amixr, a startup that developed a product to rival PagerDuty and later got acquired by Grafana Labs, before joining Keep.

At its core, Keep is an integration service that pulls in data from a very wide variety of infrastructure services and observability tools and then uses all of this to enrich the individual alerts with more context. In the open-source version, this is done mainly by using Keep's workflow tooling to create triggers and their corresponding actions.

The company runs its service atop this open source tooling and monetizes its platform. For example, Keep's AI models may support things like noise reduction, event correlation, or even root cause analysis. Not unlike most other open source startups, Keep keeps features like expanded data retention, single sign-on support, or private deployments for its paying enterprise customers.

"We found that it surprises people because when the enterprises try us, it's very easy for an engineer to start with the open source and to deploy Keep — even on a laptop with Docker compose or Kubernetes — and just see what Keep gives them out of the box and to see the value of it in two hours. We find these folks become our champions in the organization," Kukuy explained.

Competing environment. As Keep CEO Borenstein puts it, the window is still open for startups in this space until the next year or two. There are some "big, non-modern companies" working within this field, but in his opinion, all incumbent observability tools most see alerting as a feature inside their platform. And the AIOps startups which launched earlier are nowadays "locked into their old propositions.".

The market is very promising, but technically has been narrowed down to alerts because of early entrants that didn't perform so well product-wise and corrupted it, said Borenstein. We believe the AIOps market has a lot of potential, and a new category is incoming based on intelligence layered on top of the observability stack.

Runa Capital was the leading investor in the pre-seed round, though one cannot help but to notice that undisclosed angels who participated also built tech companies in adjacent areas.