Phoebe Raises $17M to Build the First “Immune System” for Software
The ex-Stripe and Google team is building an AI agent platform that eliminates downtime by continuously investigating and preemptively fixing software failures.
LONDON, UK – WEDNESDAY 20 AUGUST 2025
As AI accelerates the creation of new software, fixing live systems has remained stubbornly manual. Phoebe‘s AI agents continuously monitor and react to live system data, diagnosing emerging issues and generating code and infrastructure changes to resolve them. The company today announced $17 million (£12.6 million) in seed funding led by GV and Cherry Ventures and the public launch of their platform, which is already live with engineering teams from early access customers such as Trainline and PPRO.
The cost of downtime is already vast and poised to explode as AI generated code leads to systems that are less well understood when things go wrong. Financial losses from software outages grew to more than $400 billion in 2024, and the productivity burden is even greater, with the world’s 40 million developers estimated to spend 30% of their time reacting to bugs and errors.
Phoebe was founded by Matt Henderson and James Summerfield, formerly CEO and CIO of Stripe Europe, who sold their first startup, Rangespan, to Google in 2014. Henderson explains that their motivation for building Phoebe was experiencing the frustrations of software failures first-hand in past roles: “High-severity incidents can make or break big customer relationships, and numerous smaller problems drain engineering productivity. Software monitoring tools exist, but they aren’t very intelligent and require people to spend a lot of time working out what’s wrong and what to do about it.”
Phoebe’s breakthrough comes from ‘swarms’ of AI agents that search for evidence among vast siloed data to evaluate many different potential causes and solutions for a problem. “With Phoebe supporting the diagnosis, we’ve found that time-to-resolution can be up to 90% faster” says Henderson.
What’s even better than a faster resolution is preventing the incident before it occurs. Phoebe can already predict some incidents from leading indicators, then generate preemptive fixes before disruption occurs. The company’s vision is for these agents to serve as an “immune system for software”, eventually making it possible for the overwhelming majority of emergent problems to be prevented before becoming customer-impacting failures.
Roni Hiranand at GV said: “AI has transformed how code is written, but software reliability has not kept pace. Phoebe is building a missing layer of contextual intelligence that can help both human and AI engineers avoid software failures. We love the boldness of the team’s vision for a software immune system that preemptively fixes problems.”
Jay Davies, Head of Engineering for Reliability and Operations at Trainline, said: “Phoebe has already had a real impact on how we investigate and remediate incidents at Trainline. Work that used to take us hours to piece together can now take minutes and that matters when you’re running critical services at our scale. We’re excited to see Phoebe progress and help us operate efficiently”
ENDS
About Phoebe
Founded in 2024 and headquartered in London, Phoebe is building the “immune system” for modern software. Its platform uses swarms of AI agents to continuously investigate and fix problems in the production environment, reducing incident resolution times by up to 90% and preventing disruptions. Phoebe serves companies across fintech, digital commerce, and software-as-a-service, helping them improve reliability, reduce operational risk, and free up engineers from time-intensive manual investigation work. For more information, visit: www.phoebe.ai
About GV
Launched as Google Ventures in 2009, GV supports innovative founders moving the world forward. We are a multi-stage venture capital firm that invests across sectors, including artificial intelligence, the life sciences, consumer, enterprise, and frontier technology. GV is a non-strategic and independent venture firm that oversees over $10 billion in assets under management, with Alphabet as a sole Limited Partner. GV has backed 400 active portfolio companies spanning North America, Europe, and Israel. The firm is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, with offices in Cambridge, New York, and London.
About Cherry Ventures
Cherry Ventures is Europe’s leading early-stage venture capital firm led by a team of founders and operators with experience building fast-scaling companies such as Spotify, Zalando, and Uber. The firm backs Europe’s boldest founders, usually as their first institutional investor, and supports them in everything from their go-to-market strategy, scaling of their business, and team formation across all crucial stages in their journey. Cherry Ventures has previously invested in the pre-seed and seed stages of over 100 companies across Europe, including FlixBus, Auto1 Group, Flaschenpost, Moss, The Exploration Company, Forto, and Juni. With operations in Berlin, London, and Stockholm, Cherry Ventures invests across Europe and across industries. www.cherry.vc
