Freshworks Buys Robusta for AI Outage Investigation

Freshworks has bought Robusta, a start-up whose AI agents investigate IT outages, work out what caused them and suggest fixes for engineers to approve. Robusta’s technology will be built into Freshservice, Freshworks’ IT service management software. Neither company disclosed a price.

Freshworks announced the deal in a company post, and Robusta’s co-founder and chief executive, Natan Yellin, explained the decision in a blog post. It follows Freshworks’ agreement earlier this month to buy Torii, which helps companies manage software and AI spending.

What Robusta does

Freshworks describes Robusta as working “like an AI site reliability engineer that’s always on call”. When something breaks, its AI agents look through monitoring data, infrastructure telemetry and recent code or configuration changes. They then identify the root cause, map which other services are affected and show the evidence behind the conclusion.

The agents can recommend fixes, but only within limits set by the customer, and engineers review and approve any change before it reaches live systems. Freshworks says the software can also roll hundreds of alerts from one failing service into a single investigated incident, cutting duplicate work. Freshworks says Robusta has been heavily optimised for very large production environments, where even brief reliability problems can cost customers revenue.

Inside Freshservice, Robusta will draw on the customer’s records of business services, dependencies between systems and change history. Its findings will flow into incident timelines in FireHydrant, an incident response platform, and into Slack and Microsoft Teams channels. Data from each incident will feed into reviews afterwards and into Freshservice’s checks on future changes. Recognised incident patterns can be turned into automatic checks run before new releases.

“LLMs are fantastic at troubleshooting incidents,” said Yellin. “Our technology lets AI Agents do that effectively in large enterprise environments, where there are so many raw events that investigating each one individually would be exorbitant from a token cost perspective.” He said joining Freshworks would bring that to more engineering teams “while keeping humans firmly in control of decisions that touch production”.

From Kubernetes tool to AI agent

Yellin wrote that he started Robusta in 2021 to help engineers find out faster why production systems had broken, starting with Kubernetes. When large language models arrived, the company rebuilt its platform as an AI agent, HolmesGPT, betting that accuracy problems would shrink as models improved.

The next problem was cost. Running an AI investigation on every alert was too expensive for enterprise customers, Yellin wrote, so many limited it to critical incidents and missed early warnings in low-priority alerts. Robusta says it found a way to investigate large volumes of alerts with “non-linear token costs” without losing accuracy.

Yellin said Freshworks approached Robusta, and that he and co-founder Arik Alon have spent recent months with its team. “In practice, little changes today,” he wrote, adding that Robusta will keep hiring.

The real product is cheaper investigation

Plenty of companies now pitch AI agents for outages, including Datadog with its Scout model. What sets Robusta’s pitch apart is cost rather than cleverness. If every alert can be investigated cheaply, the agent can catch small problems before they become outages, instead of being saved for the worst incidents. That is a claim about token bills as much as about accuracy, and neither company has published figures to back it.

The human approval step matters too. Letting an agent change production systems on its own is a risk many IT teams are wary of, and Robusta’s fixes stay as recommendations until an engineer signs them off.

For Freshworks, the deal adds technical depth to a product that competes with larger IT service management vendors such as ServiceNow, which is wiring its own workflows into AI platforms. Freshworks has not said when Robusta’s features will appear in Freshservice or what they will cost.