The company claims that its platform connects with over thirty enterprise technologies related to databases, cloud infrastructure, observability, and other technology environments.
startup for AI-native incident management In a pre-seed fundraising round headed by SenseAI Ventures and involving Uppekkha, Sherlocks AI has raised Rs 7.5 crore.
The business intends to use the additional funds to improve its AI-powered platform, bolster product development, and expedite its North American go-to-market initiatives.
Gaurav Toshniwal and Akshat Jain founded Sherlocks AI in 2025 with the goal of developing an AI-native incident management platform that will assist businesses in identifying, looking into, and fixing production problems in cloud-native and microservices-based settings.
Databases, Kubernetes clusters, networks, cloud infrastructure, and CI/CD pipelines are just a few of the crucial technical levels where the platform employs AI agents to evaluate problems. Sherlocks AI seeks to shorten the time engineering teams need to find the underlying reasons and fix compromised systems by automating investigation operations.
The company claims that its platform connects with over thirty enterprise technologies related to databases, cloud infrastructure, observability, and other technology environments. Additionally, Sherlocks AI claims to adhere to enterprise-grade security procedures, such as SOC 2 Type 2 compliance.
As it increases the use of its AI-driven incident response solutions, the business presently serves mid-market and enterprise clients, such as Fynd, Lokal, and TradeIndia.
Gaurav Toshniwal co-founded Aasaanjobs, a recruitment technology company that was purchased by OLX, prior to starting Sherlocks AI. Later on, he was Doubtnut’s Chief Technology Officer. At Doubtnut, co-founder Akshat Jain oversaw search and machine learning projects.
AI-native incident management startup Sherlocks AI has secured ₹7.5 crore (approximately $900K) in a pre-seed round led by SenseAI Ventures, with participation from accelerator and investor Uppekkha. The capital will fund product development and a push into the North American market.
herlocks AI, an AI-native incident management startup, has raised ₹7.5 crore in a pre-seed funding round led by SenseAI Ventures, with participation from startup accelerator and investor Uppekkha. The Bengaluru-founded company, which builds AI agents that autonomously investigate and diagnose production failures inside complex cloud infrastructure, plans to deploy the fresh capital toward strengthening its product and accelerating its go-to-market push into North America — a market where demand for agentic Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and IT Operations (ITOps) tooling is growing rapidly.
Founded in 2025 by Gaurav Toshniwal and Akshat Jain, Sherlocks AI is targeting a problem that has quietly become one of the more expensive blind spots in modern software engineering: when production systems break, figuring out why is still largely a manual, fragmented, and time-consuming process — even at companies that have invested heavily in observability and monitoring tooling over the past decade.
“AI has transformed how code gets written and shipped, but when things break in production, diagnosis is still manual and fragmented. We built Sherlocks AI to close that gap, so engineering teams spend less time firefighting and more time building.”
What Sherlocks AI Actually Does
Sherlocks AI’s core proposition is a shift from passive observability to active, autonomous investigation. Rather than simply surfacing dashboards, alerts, and metrics for a human engineer to interpret — the standard approach across most existing monitoring and observability tools — Sherlocks AI dispatches specialised AI agents that perform the investigation themselves, in much the same sequence a senior site reliability engineer would follow when paged for a production incident.
According to the company, its platform deploys more than 16 specialised AI agents, each trained for a specific domain of enterprise infrastructure — including databases, Kubernetes clusters, cloud environments, networks, and CI/CD pipelines. When an alert fires from a company’s existing monitoring stack, these agents correlate signals across the relevant systems, form and test hypotheses about the likely root cause, and converge on a diagnosis — producing a root cause analysis complete with recommended next steps and a full investigation trail, without waiting on a human engineer to manually kick off that process.
“We architected Sherlocks AI as a true agentic system: specialized agents that reason over a live model of your environment, form and test hypotheses the way a senior engineer would, and converge on root cause without waiting for a human to kick off the investigation.”
The Founders: Built by Engineers Who Lived the Problem
Sherlocks AI’s founding story follows a familiar but credible pattern in enterprise software: both founders previously held CTO-level roles and spent years personally managing on-call rotations and incident response before building the platform they say they wished they had at the time.
Previously co-founded Aasaanjobs, a recruitment technology platform later acquired by OLX. He subsequently served as Chief Technology Officer at Doubtnut, the edtech company, where he managed engineering operations at scale.
Also previously at Doubtnut, where he led search and machine learning functions — gaining direct experience building large-scale AI and data-driven systems, a background directly relevant to Sherlocks AI’s agentic architecture.
Who Is Backing the Round
The pre-seed round was led by SenseAI Ventures, with additional participation from Uppekkha, a startup accelerator and investor with a track record of backing early-stage B2B SaaS companies. Rahul Agarwalla, Managing Partner at SenseAI Ventures, framed the investment thesis around a specific and increasingly urgent enterprise pain point: AI’s promise inside actual production operations, as distinct from AI’s already well-demonstrated value in writing and shipping code.
Customers and Early Traction
Sherlocks AI has already secured a notable early customer base spanning enterprise and mid-market technology companies operating cloud-native or hybrid infrastructure. The company’s disclosed customers include Fynd, the Reliance-backed e-commerce and retail technology platform; Lokal, the Y Combinator-backed hyperlocal content platform; and TradeIndia, one of India’s largest B2B marketplaces. The company states its platform integrates with more than 30 enterprise tools across cloud infrastructure, observability, and database environments — a breadth of integration that matters significantly for incident management tooling, since most enterprises run a fragmented mix of monitoring and infrastructure tools rather than a single unified stack.
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Startup | Sherlocks AI |
| Industry | AI-Native Incident Management Platform |
| Founded | 2025 |
| Founders | Gaurav Toshniwal, Akshat Jain |
| Funding Raised | ₹7.5 crore (approximately $900K) – Pre-seed Round |
| Lead Investor | SenseAI Ventures |
| Participating Investor | Uppekkha |
| Disclosed Customers | Fynd, Lokal, TradeIndia |
| Enterprise Integrations | 30+ tools |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type 2 |
| Funding Date | June 23, 2026 |
The Market Opportunity: Why Incident Management Now
The timing of Sherlocks AI’s emergence tracks closely with a broader structural shift in enterprise software architecture. As companies increasingly migrate to cloud-native, microservices-based, and distributed systems, the complexity of diagnosing a production failure has grown substantially — a single user-facing error can originate from any one of dozens of interdependent services, making root-cause identification a genuinely difficult, time-consuming task even for experienced engineers.
The category Sherlocks AI is targeting — broadly described in the industry as agentic SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) and ITOps tooling — has attracted growing investor and enterprise attention precisely because the cost of slow incident resolution is concrete and measurable: every additional minute of Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) during an outage translates directly into lost revenue, degraded customer trust, and engineering hours diverted from building new features toward “firefighting,” in Toshniwal’s own framing.
What Comes Next
With this pre-seed capital in hand, Sherlocks AI’s stated near-term priorities are twofold: continuing to deepen its product — likely expanding the range and sophistication of its specialised AI agents and the breadth of its enterprise tool integrations — and establishing a go-to-market presence in North America, a market where enterprise budgets for AI-driven infrastructure tooling are both larger and growing faster than in most other regions. For a pre-seed-stage company, the explicit framing of North America as a near-term GTM target rather than a longer-term ambition signals confidence from both the founding team and SenseAI Ventures in the platform’s readiness to compete in a more mature, higher-stakes enterprise software market.
