The unglamorous software that keeps 300,000 networks from falling over - and the Austin company that learned to rebuild trust after the most talked-about hack of the decade.
For nearly five decades, a quiet software company near Stuttgart has been helping big organizations tame the IT sprawl no one else wants to touch - and it just landed a Thoma Bravo backer to do more of it.
Inside the quiet French software company that has spent three decades making corporate IT support less painful - and is now betting on AI to do the boring parts.

For 45 years BMC has been the software running quietly behind banks, airlines and mainframes. Now, owned by KKR and split into two companies, it is betting that boring, dependable automation is exactly what agentic AI needs.
The enterprise AI agent that answered phones before chatbots were cool - a 26-year-old New York company that became SoundHound's play for the voice-first future of customer service.

Topaz Turkenitz is the co-founder and CEO of Vespper (YC F24), a multi-agent AI system that acts as a 24/7 on-call engineer, triaging alerts and troubleshooting incidents through Slack in seconds. A full-stack software engineer with a background in computer science and design, she spent years at the security unicorn Snyk building distributed systems at 99.9% uptime and running growth experiments before setting out to make on-call work stress-free.
Vespper (YC F24) builds infrastructure that lets AI agents produce real Microsoft Word documents. Its product is a docx MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that turns raw agent output into clean, tracked, review-ready .docx files - aimed at regulated, legal, and compliance workflows where the final artifact has to be a Word doc with tracked changes, not a chat window. The two-person, Tel Aviv-based team originally launched an open-source, 24/7 AI on-call engineer for incident triage before pivoting into agent document infrastructure.

apiphani is a Boston-based, AI-native managed services company that keeps mission-critical enterprise applications - especially complex SAP and Oracle environments - running without downtime. Instead of the labor-arbitrage model used by large global systems integrators, apiphani pairs small teams of senior engineers with its proprietary observability platform, luumen, and its Deep Automation technology to detect and resolve issues before users notice them. Founded in 2018 and led by CEO Justin Folkers, the company reports 100% production uptime across its clients for more than two years and raised a $25M Series A led by Insight Partners in October 2025.

Xiaodan Zhuang, who also goes by Dennis, is the co-founder and CEO of Greptime, a company building GreptimeDB, an open-source observability database written in Rust that unifies metrics, logs, and traces. Before starting Greptime in 2022, he spent roughly 18 years in software infrastructure, including leading the intelligent monitoring team at Ant Group where he built ultra-large-scale time-series platforms for AIOps, plus earlier stints at Taobao/Alibaba and LeanCloud. He is a long-time open-source contributor (GitHub handle killme2008) behind projects like Aviator and xmemcached, and a self-described car enthusiast who races on tracks.

Fabrix.ai (formerly CloudFabrix) is a Pleasanton, California enterprise software company building an agentic operational intelligence platform. It lets organizations design, deploy, operate and observe AI agents across IT, network, security and business operations, anchored by a tri-fabric architecture of Data Fabric, AI Fabric and Automation Fabric. The company positions itself for the 'agentic AI era' with production-grade governance, explainability and human-in-the-loop controls.

Fabrix.ai has been selected as the sole purpose-built agentic AI platform in the AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) Recommended Toolkit, one of just ten approved solutions. The designation qualifies 295+ AWS Validated MSPs — including NTT Data, Capgemini, IBM, Wipro, Tech Mahindra, SHI, and Telefónica — to receive up to $50,000 annually in AWS Marketing and Tooling Development Funds to adopt the platform. Fabrix.ai gives MSPs an operational context layer to deploy, govern, and scale AI agents across hybrid multi-cloud environments, accelerating the industry's shift from reactive, labor-driven operations to autonomous, self-healing infrastructure.

Raju Datla is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Fabrix.ai (formerly CloudFabrix), an AI-native IT operations platform he founded in 2015. Before Fabrix.ai, he sold two companies to Cisco - Jahi Networks (~$16M, 2004) and Cloupia ($125M, 2012), the latter becoming the foundation of Cisco's UCS management suite. At Fabrix.ai, he is pioneering Agentic AI for enterprise IT operations through a Robotic Data Automation Fabric that unifies data ingestion, AI agent orchestration, and workflow automation at scale.
Justin Folkers is the co-founder and CEO of apiphani, a Boston-based technology-enabled managed services company that runs mission-critical enterprise applications such as SAP using a blend of expert engineers and AI-driven automation. He started the company around 2020 after more than two decades supporting enterprise clients at firms including Virtustream and Capgemini, betting that AI-powered automation would let people focus on meaningful work instead of routine operational tasks. In 2025 apiphani raised a $25 million round led by Insight Partners to expand Luumen, its AI-driven observability and automation platform.
Avanseus is a Singapore-based artificial intelligence company that builds predictive maintenance software for telecommunications and industrial IoT networks. Its flagship Cognitive Assistant for Networks uses a patented unsupervised learning algorithm to forecast network faults and degradations days in advance and to surface likely root causes, letting operators fix problems before customers feel them. Founded in 2015, the company was acquired by Accenture in February 2026 to strengthen Accenture's push toward autonomous telecom networks.
Cake is a New York-based startup that bundles the sprawling open-source AI stack into a single managed platform, so companies - especially in regulated industries like finance, insurance and healthcare - can deploy AI inside their own cloud without wiring together 100+ tools by hand. Founded in 2022 by Misha Herscu and Skyler Thomas and launched from stealth in December 2024 with a $13M seed led by Google's Gradient Ventures, Cake handles the integration, security, governance and cost-monitoring glue around open-source components like LangChain, Ray, MLflow and vector databases, all deployed inside a customer's own VPC so data never leaves.
James (Jim) Rebesco is the co-founder and CEO of Striveworks, an Austin-based AI company that helps the U.S. defense and national-security community build, deploy, and monitor machine-learning models at scale through its Chariot platform. A physicist by training (Caltech) and a computational neuroscientist by doctorate (Northwestern), he spent seven years as a partner at high-frequency trading firm Virtu Financial before turning to operational AI. Under his leadership Striveworks has landed a $70M enterprise government agreement, raised a Series B led by Washington Harbour Partners, and become the first company to bridge the U.S. Army's two largest battlefield AI efforts.
Dev Nag is the founder and CEO of QueryPal, a San Francisco AI company rebuilding the economics of customer support with agentic automation. A serial founder with deep machine-learning roots, he earlier created Wavefront, the real-time cloud monitoring platform acquired by VMware in 2017, where he went on to launch VMware's flagship AIOps product. He also founded the observability startup CtrlStack, backed by Sequoia Capital and Engineering Capital. Before founding companies he was an engineer at Google, PayPal, and eBay and the founding engineer at securities-trading platform GLMX. Stanford-trained in both mathematics and psychology, he holds more than a dozen AI and security patents and authored one of the most widely read beginner tutorials in deep learning, 'GANs in 50 lines of code.'
Netenrich is a San Jose-based security and digital operations company that helps enterprises run modern security operations on Google SecOps. Its Resolution Intelligence Cloud platform combines agentic AI, big-data analytics, and human expertise to power Adaptive MDR, Cyber Risk Operations, and threat detection - shifting security teams from chasing alerts toward what the company calls autonomic security operations.
Riverbed Technology is a San Francisco-based IT software company that helps large enterprises see, optimize, and troubleshoot the digital experiences their people and customers depend on. Originally famous for the SteelHead WAN-optimization appliance, Riverbed has reinvented itself around AI-powered unified observability - stitching together network, application, and end-user telemetry, then layering predictive, generative, and agentic AI on top to spot problems and increasingly fix them automatically. Founded in 2002, taken private by Thoma Bravo in 2015 and again by Vector Capital in 2023, it serves thousands of global organizations across finance, government, healthcare, retail, and beyond.
ATAD Corp. is a Seoul-based technology company building an AI-driven multi-cloud operating platform that helps teams run AWS, Azure, and GCP environments from one place. Its flagship product, ODiiN, uses AI to forecast and self-heal infrastructure problems, claiming up to 80% cost savings and large productivity gains. Founded in 2023 by cloud and cybersecurity specialists, ATAD pairs cloud automation with a security stack built on AI, multi-factor authentication, and zero-knowledge proofs, and also runs Heiimdahl (a multi-LLM monitoring gateway) and Kraton (a blockchain-based decentralized VPN). The company has raised about $3.36M and holds a growing portfolio of patents in multi-cloud integration and secure data distribution.
Zelar (ZelarSoft) is a cloud-native engineering and consulting firm that helps banks, telcos, oil & gas, and government teams adopt Kubernetes, DevOps, and AI without the usual pain. Founded in 2018 and led by CEO Vasu Maganti, the company pairs hands-on services - cloud migration, SRE, security, and data engineering - with its own platforms: Klusternetes for self-service Kubernetes multi-tenancy, OpenOps for production-ready GKE stacks, and Cokpit for agentic AI DevOps. A Google Cloud Premier Partner with offices across the US, Canada, India, and the UAE, Zelar bets that most teams want cloud-native outcomes, not cloud-native homework.
MegazoneCloud is South Korea's largest managed cloud service provider (MSP) and the country's first cloud MSP unicorn. Spun out of Megazone in 2018, it became AWS's first official partner in Korea back in 2012 and is now the No.1 AWS premier consulting partner across Asia Pacific. With roughly 2,800 cloud specialists, it helps more than 5,000 customers - from large enterprises and game studios to startups and public institutions - migrate to, build on, and operate AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. The company is pivoting hard toward AI, packaging its work into the proprietary AIR platform (AIR Studio, AIR AIOps, AIR Build) to help organizations become 'AI-native.'
Striveworks is an Austin-based AI operations company whose Chariot platform helps organizations build, deploy, monitor, and retrain machine learning models in hours rather than months. Built for highly regulated and contested environments - especially U.S. national security and allied defense - Chariot pairs a fast MLOps workflow with end-to-end data and model lineage, giving customers governance and provenance over models that must keep working when conditions change.
BMC Software is a Houston-founded enterprise software company that builds the IT operations, service management, and mainframe automation tools that keep large organizations running. Founded in 1980 by three former Shell engineers, BMC has spent four decades turning the unglamorous work of keeping systems alive - monitoring, scheduling, patching, recovering - into automated, increasingly AI-driven products. Its flagship lines include Control-M (workload automation), the BMC AMI mainframe suite, and BMC Helix (service and operations management). Owned by KKR since 2018, BMC split into two focused companies, BMC and BMC Helix, in early 2025.
New Relic is a San Francisco-based, AI-powered observability platform that gives engineering teams a single place to see everything running in their software - from application code and infrastructure to logs, user experience, and AI models. Founded in 2008 by Lew Cirne, it helped popularize application performance monitoring (APM) and later coined much of the modern 'observability' category. After going public in 2014 and being taken private in a $6.5 billion deal in 2023, New Relic now serves thousands of companies with usage-based, consumption pricing and a strong bet on AI and agentic observability.
Ayman Sayed is President and CEO of BMC Software, the $2.3-billion enterprise software company serving 86% of the Forbes Global 50. He joined BMC in 2019 after senior roles at CA Technologies (President and Chief Product Officer) and Cisco (SVP, leading 2,500+ engineers). Under his tenure, BMC pivoted toward AI-driven IT automation under the 'Autonomous Digital Enterprise' framework, and in 2024 he announced a landmark split of BMC into two independent companies - one focused on mainframe software and one on digital services management.
BigPanda is an AIOps platform that uses machine learning to correlate noisy IT alerts from hundreds of monitoring tools into actionable incidents, helping enterprise operations teams detect, triage and resolve outages faster. Founded in 2012 and based in Mountain View / Redwood City, it serves large enterprises including Intel, PayPal, Workday and Gap.
Assaf Resnick is the co-founder and CEO of BigPanda, an AI-powered IT operations platform valued at $1.2 billion. Born in Israel and raised in Silicon Valley, he spent six years as a principal investor at Sequoia Capital Israel before leaving to build BigPanda in 2012. After pivoting from ad-tech and surviving years of near-silence in the market, BigPanda found product-market fit with large enterprises and has raised over $330 million in total funding. Today the company leads the emerging category of agentic IT operations, helping enterprise teams automate the detection, investigation, and resolution of IT incidents.
Kannan Kothandaraman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Selector AI, a Santa Clara-based AIOps and network observability platform that uses large language models, knowledge graphs, and causal reasoning to help Fortune 1000 enterprises detect, diagnose, and resolve infrastructure issues faster. Before founding Selector in 2019, Kannan spent nearly two decades at Juniper Networks - rising from senior software engineer to Vice President of Product Line Management - and before that at Cisco Systems. Selector has raised $104 million in total funding, including a $32M Series B in February 2026 at a valuation of $375 million, and counts Fortune 20 companies in manufacturing and healthcare among its customers.
Selector is an AI-powered network and infrastructure observability platform founded by ex-Juniper Networks executives. It combines a network-specific large language model, knowledge graphs, and causal reasoning to ingest telemetry from across complex hybrid environments, cut alert noise, surface root cause, and reduce mean time to resolution for telecoms, cloud providers, and global enterprises.