Freshworks buys Robusta to add an AI incident investigator to Freshservice

Freshworks has acquired Robusta Dev, an Israel-based startup whose AI investigates technology outages, finds their root causes and recommends fixes, the company announced on October 28. The Economic Times and The Hindu BusinessLine reported that financial terms were not disclosed.

Freshworks describes Robusta as working like an always-on AI site reliability engineer. When something breaks, its agents look at monitoring data, infrastructure telemetry and recent code or configuration changes, work out the likely cause, map which dependent services are affected and suggest remediation. Engineers review and approve any change before it touches production.

The plan is to bring that diagnosis into Freshservice, Freshworks' IT service management product, using its service context, CMDB dependencies and change history, and to pass findings into incident tools such as FireHydrant and Slack or Teams channels. Post-incident data is meant to feed back into change guardrails so the same failure is less likely to recur.

Robusta was started in 2021 by Natan Yellin and Arik Alon. In a blog post, Yellin wrote that the first version focused on Kubernetes before the team rebuilt the product as an AI agent called HolmesGPT. He said little changes for customers today and that the team will keep hiring as part of Freshworks.