Selector Software Secures $33M to Revolutionize Network Outage Detection with AI

Selector Software raises $33M funding round to fix network outages with AI - SiliconANGLE

Selector Software raises $33M funding round to fix network outages with AI Artificial intelligence-native network monitoring startup Selector Software Inc. said today it has closed on a $33 million round of funding, bringing its total amount raised to date to more than $66 million. Today's Series B round was led by Ansa Capital and saw participation from existing investors Two Bear Capital, Atlantic Bridge and Sinewave Ventures, plus new investors such as AT&T, Bell, Singtel Innov8 and Hyperlink Ventures. The startup is the creator of an AI-powered event intelligence platform that's designed to give telecommunications providers and other enterprises deep insights and visibility into their complex networks and application infrastructures, so they can identify the source of any problems that occur. According to Selector, modern enterprises face having to deal with a significant increase in complexity as they migrate their most critical systems and applications to the cloud. As they do this, they're also dealing with an increasing number of new technologies, and the result is that they end up facing more complex and frequent outages, for both networks and applications. However, many organizations slack the teams and expertise to deal with such issues quickly enough, resulting in extended downtime when issues occur. The problem is that up to 90% of the repair time is spent on trying to locate the origin of the issue that's causing the outage. When incidents occur, teams have to wade through massive volumes of data to try and work out what has gone wrong and what they need to fix, and this is where Selector's platform comes in handy. Selector reckons it can reduce the time it takes to find the cause of issues to just a few seconds. By interfacing directly with an organization's network language model platform, it creates a digital twin of their infrastructure that allows it to model how everything is running normally. This makes it easier to understand the source of any issues that occur, and teams can then engage in real-time, natural language conversations with their infrastructure stack via the Selector Copilot to determine exactly what has gone wrong. Selector co-founder and Chief Executive Kannan Kothandaraman said even a second's downtime is too much for some organization's most mission-critical networking infrastructure. Teams need a way to instantly understand what's wrong, and that's what his company's platform is trying to deliver. "Solving this problem requires auto-correlating across enormous volumes of data, and that's why we exist," he said. "We've spent the last five years demonstrating how autonomous AI technology and human network expertise can work together to ensure that the world's most demanding networks are up, operating, and generating revenue at all times. We're now ready to scale this work significantly." Kothandaraman and his co-founder Nitin Kumar acquired their networking expertise at Juniper Networks Inc., and have hired a team of network and large language model experts from that company, as well as others from Cisco Systems Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Nutanix Inc. and VMware Inc. They reckon Selector's technology has already been deployed by a number of large enterprises, including Canada's largest telecommunications company, one of the world's biggest web and email hosting service providers and a leading provider of managed software-defined networking services. With the funding from today's round, Selector aims to improve its AIOps stack and expand its geographic footprint, opening new offices across the U.S., Canada, Europe, Singapore, India and Japan. Ansa Capital General Partner Allan Jean-Baptiste said he believes Selector can help to solve a very expensive problem for some of the world's largest companies. "The rise of cloud technology, distributed microservices, and the need for seamless 24/7 performance have significantly increased the demands on enterprise network teams," Jean-Baptiste said. "Selector has proven that it can achieve 360-degree visibility across networks and prescribe action instantly after an incident occurs."

Selector automatically spots IT issues and recommends fixes

AIOps, short for artificial intelligence in operations, is a process that uses AI to automate IT tasks. More organizations are embracing it as AI commodifies, yet adoption is still lagging. According to a recent IDC survey, almost half of companies said that they were just getting started in AIOps, while a third indicated they had an AIOps roadmap but "had a lot more work to do." Longtime Juniper Network execs Kannan Kothandaraman and Nitin Kumar thought they might know how to spread AIOps far and wide. In 2019, they founded Selector, which uses data and AI to attempt to identify IT problems and ways to fix them. "We came up with the initial idea for Selector after working with a major hyperscaler and getting a view into how they were using data to better optimize their network operations," Kothandaraman told TechCrunch. "They were able to put machine learning and AI to work throughout their network, using their data to increase efficiency." So Kothandaraman and Kumar started chatting with similar companies in the space. A lot were looking for help to achieve what the hyperscaler did -- that is, building AI into their operations. After assembling a team, Kothandaraman and Kumar launched Selector. The company's platform monitors corporate infrastructure, prescribing actions after an IT incident occurs. Via an AI-powered chat interface, users can ask questions about problems -- e.g. "Where did this outage occur?" -- and Selector will respond in natural language. "The main thing we're doing is simplifying," Kothandaraman said. "There's an explosion of complexity and data that teams are struggling to deal with in enterprises. We're providing the insights that these teams need to do their work." Now, Selector has competition -- and a fair amount of it. There's Keep and Senser, which aim to help operations teams reduce alert fatigue. BigPanda is one of the larger AIOps players, having raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital. And incumbents like New Relic and ServiceNow offer their own AIOps solutions. Fortunately for Selector, the AIOps market is growing at a rapid clip. By one estimate, the sector will generate $213.66 billion by 2033, up from $25.24 billion in 2023. Selector, which has around 40 customers including AT&T, Bell Canada, and Singtell, this month closed a $33 million Series B round led by Ansa. Kothandaraman wouldn't share Selector's valuation, but he said that it's increased 4x since October 2021. "In the last two years, we've been deployed by some of the largest telecommunications and enterprise companies in the world," he said. "Now we're seeing increased demand from others. It's the time to invest in expanding our footprint and awareness." Bringing Selector's total raised to $66 million, the Series B proceeds will be put toward expanding the company's footprint with new offices and staff across the U.S., Canada, Europe, Singapore, India, and Japan, Kothandaraman said. Selector plans to grow its workforce from 115 people to 150 next year. Two Bear Capital, Atlantic Bridge, Sinewave Ventures, and the aforementioned client AT&T, Bell Canada, and Singtell also participated in Selector's Series B.