After leading SRE.ai’s $7.2M seed round, Salesforce Ventures investors Rob Keith and Dom Pusateri interviewed CEO Rajsekhar Kadiyala about why he and co-founder Edward Ayree built SRE.ai, lessons learned from their journey to date, advice for raising capital, and much more.
Rob Keith: How would you describe SRE.ai’s mission?
Rajsekhar Kadiyala: Our mission is to make enterprise software reliability autonomous — so every builder can move faster, deliver with confidence, and scale without limits. Developer teams should have confidence that they can build quickly and safely to better enable their sales teams, revenue teams, customers, and all other aspects of their business.
Dom: Pusateri: What inspired you and Edward to start SRE.ai?
Rajsekhar Kadiyala: In our time at Google, we experienced world-class DevOps and infrastructure tooling — Google literally invented the term SRE (Site Reliability Engineering). However, we realized in our work that there was a huge gap between what other people are using and the best-in-class tools we had access to.
It wasn’t a single lightbulb moment that launched the company, but rather thousands of them. Every time we talked to engineers spending hours untangling metadata conflicts instead of shipping value, it gnawed at us. Enterprises were stitching together dozens of tools, building brittle pipelines, and firefighting instead of innovating. What inspired us was the idea that AI could change that dynamic — not just by automating tasks, but by making infrastructure and application management accessible in plain language. We wanted to bring the same level of abstraction that Salesforce brought to business users, but for the engineering backbone of enterprises.
Rob Keith: When SRE.ai set out to raise a seed round, what types of partners were you looking for, and why did you ultimately choose Salesforce Ventures as your lead?
Rajsekhar Kadiyala: More than anything, we were looking for people who’d had experience with the problem or were deeply tied to the ecosystem. The benefit of this approach is that we gain firsthand experience to add to our team as we engage with customers, resulting in a wealth of knowledge to help us deliver as efficiently and completely as possible.
We first met with the Salesforce Ventures team around YC Demo Day. Salesforce Ventures has a fantastic track record of supporting YC founders and companies — we continued to hear positive stories and feedback from other alumni, and knew that as an investor, Salesforce Ventures would be incredible to have on board.
Dom: Pusateri: What role do you see Salesforce Ventures playing in SRE.ai’s growth?
Rajsekhar Kadiyala: We see Salesforce Ventures as a partner that can help us accelerate go-to-market and build credibility with enterprise buyers. The network and platform expertise can help us amplify our reach and validate our solution in front of exactly the right customers.
In the long term, our goal is to redefine how enterprise teams manage deployments across complex SaaS platforms. We view Salesforce Ventures as a partner who can help us expand into adjacent ecosystems.
Rob Keith: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received as a founder?
Rajsekhar Kadiyala: Marc Benioff once said, “you need to get to the future, ahead of your customers, and be ready to greet them when they arrive.” As engineers, we get excited about the tech — about building something necessary that couldn’t have existed in the past. But time and time again, we see that being grounded in the customer pain points and keeping our focus on delivering an experience that will fundamentally change customers’ businesses for the better is everything.
Dom: Pusateri: If you were starting SRE.ai from scratch today, what would you do differently?
Rajsekhar Kadiyala: In addition to focusing on a particular ecosystem like we did, I would start with an even narrower, high-value use case and expand. Looking back, I would prioritize observability and incident response over deployment workflows because that’s where we are seeing a lot of headroom in customer conversations.
Rob Keith: What’s something you’ve changed your mind about since launching SRE.ai?
Rajsekhar Kadiyala: In the early days, every decision felt like life or death. I’ve learned that progress often beats perfection; a non-optimal solution isn’t the end of the world, as long as we keep moving forward and learning quickly.
Dom: Pusateri: What’s your most controversial opinion about building a business?
Rajsekhar Kadiyala: “Move fast and break things” doesn’t work. For enterprise SaaS, trust and reliability matter more than speed at any cost. The fastest way to win is to strike a balance between innovation and stability.
Rob Keith: What leadership skill have you had to develop most to be successful?
Rajsekhar Kadiyala: The ability to balance decisiveness with a high standard. It’s really important to gather enough information to make a well-informed choice and then move forward earnestly.
Dom: Pusateri: How do you make decisions when there’s no obvious right answer?
Rajsekhar Kadiyala: We focus on principles: customer impact, long-term scalability, and alignment with our values. When data is inconclusive, we prioritize learning — choosing the path that will teach us the most, fastest.
Rob Keith: What do you think founders waste too much time or energy on?
Rajsekhar Kadiyala: Over-optimizing pitch decks, vanity metrics, or “theater” activities. The real work is talking to customers, iterating on product, and building trust.
Dom Pusateri: What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned from raising your seed round?
Rajsekhar Kadiyala: At the end of the day, customer love and trust are the only metrics that matter. Also, a lot of folks will say you need to stress a large TAM and market size when pitching investors, but the vast majority of investors we met valued our niche focus and understood that companies evolve and expand beyond their niche naturally.
Rob Keith: As you look to the future of SRE.ai, what excites you?
Rajsekhar Kadiyala: We’re excited to prove that AI-native DevOps and Observability isn’t just a vision but an industry standard. In the next phase, we’ll scale adoption across enterprises, expand with our early partners, and continue to deliver automation that turns complexity into clarity. Companies are still navigating the transition toward agentic solutions — we’re really excited to connect those solutions to bottom-line company value.
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