Phoebe, a London-based startup founded by former Stripe Europe leaders Matt Henderson and James Summerfield, has launched publicly today with a €15.6 million ($17 million) seed round led by GV (Google Ventures) and Cherry Ventures. The company is tackling one of modern software’s most persistent problems: live system failures. Their solution? AI agents that investigate, diagnose and fix software issues before they disrupt users.
Founded in 2024, Phoebe has already rolled out its platform with early customers including Trainline and PPRO. These companies are using the technology to speed up time-to-resolution by up to 90%, in some cases, to prevent incidents altogether.
Matt Henderson, CEO and co-founder of Phoebe, said: “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.”
The core innovation behind Phoebe is its use of swarms of AI agents that comb through vast, fragmented system data in real time. These agents explore multiple hypotheses at once, evaluating various causes and solutions for emerging issues. By continuously running behind the scenes, they function much like a digital immune system, resolving threats before they reach users.
“With Phoebe supporting the diagnosis, we’ve found that time-to-resolution can be up to 90% faster,” said Henderson.
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.
“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,” said Roni Hiranand, Partner at GV.
“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,” said Jay Davies, Head of Engineering for Reliability and Operations at Trainline.
Prior to Phoebe, the founding team built Rangespan, a machine learning startup acquired by Google in 2014, before going on to lead Stripe Europe as CEO and CIO. That background has given them first-hand experience in the high-stakes world of uptime and reliability.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2025/08/bugs-be-gone-phoebe-raises-e15-6-million-to-build-the-immune-system-your-software/
