Autoptic Launches to Bring Change Resilience to Large Software Engineering Teams

23 investors back startup via a lean seed round

Austin, TX. January 21, 2026. Today, Autoptic Inc. announced the general availability of its change resilience agents product. The capital-efficient enterprise software company also announced 23 initial outside investors via an intentionally small seed round. Autoptic operates in the DevOps space. It exists to help enterprise CTOs and their software engineering teams better detect, diagnose, and repair lurking production problems before they become major incidents. 

Large software teams today are faced with significant challenges. Fueled by AI co-pilots and heightened business expectations, productivity and efficiency demands are higher than ever. At the same time, change failure rates (CFRs) remain troublesome: 20% for teams that deploy daily (DORA, 2024). Latent defects missed via code reviews are also problematic, estimated at 35%-45% rates (Code Complete). Production incidents are expensive, reaching $300K+ per hour (ITIC, 2024). Telemetry information is scattered across 6+ systems (Autoptic Data). Observability systems can be expensive and hard to forecast, sometimes exceeding $1M per year and going 20% or more over budget (Autoptic Data).

Autoptic is an enterprise software solution that delivers AI-powered Agents that leverage troves of complex telemetry (logs, metrics, events, and traces) from 10+ DevOps integrations, directly and through OpenTelemetry (OTel). Integrations include CloudTrail, CloudWatch, Datadog, GitHub, Grafana LGTM, Jira, and OpenSearch. Autoptic Agents are built on Tools that are created with a DSL called PQL (Performance Query Language), enabling highly efficient and predictable change detection analytics. 

With Autoptic, proactive Briefs and always-available Investigations balance inference and deterministic pipelines to help teams quickly identify and resolve stacking degradations—before they accumulate into disruptive escalations.

The Autoptic product, uniquely constructed to solve multiple hard analytics and data problems, has been in development for approximately two years. It is driven by input from leading SRE, DevOps, and software leadership minds. It is managed and supported by FDEs (forward deployed engineers) with telemetry analytics expertise, available from Autoptic and services partners. It is deployed via a BYOC (bring your own cloud) approach, enabling security, governance, and financial predictability for customers. Today the company has six customers including $100M+ SaaS, $400M+ fintech, $500M+ CRM, and $800M+ marketplace companies, each with 80 or more software engineers and sophisticated operational systems. 

The global DevOps market that now includes Autoptic is significant. According to iMarc, it’s expected to grow at a 20% CAGR to $80B by 2033. Artificial Intelligence is fueling DevOps growth: the AI market is growing at an estimated 48% CAGR and is expected to reach $1T in 2028 according to Bain Capital and Morgan Stanley. Further, DevOps companies transact at the highest EV-to-revenue multiple across sectors: 8.8x according to AGC.

Autoptic is co-founded by CTO Peco Karayanev and CEO Steve Semelsberger. Both saw the opportunity to leverage AI, telemetry, and tools in new ways to help CTOs, DevOps leaders, and entire teams of large software engineering organizations. Karayanev’s background includes 20+ years in SRE, development, and product leadership roles for DevOps and observability companies. Semelsberger’s background covers 25+ years of building, growing, and investing in software startups, including 6+ years recently as the CEO of a quality engineering company. 

“I started Autoptic because managing change in complex systems is hard, understanding how systems behave is elusive, and engineers waste time jumping between tools while still lacking the context they need to catch problems early,” said Peco Karayanev, Co-Founder & CTO of Autoptic. “We built Autoptic to turn telemetry into clear, timely answers so teams can manage change proactively, avoid downtime, and focus on building instead of chasing data.”

“Autoptic solves a significant and complex problem that CTOs and their software engineering teams face today,” said Steve Semelsberger, Co-Founder & CEO of Autoptic. “Lurking production problems, often hidden in voluminous distributed telemetry datasets, are hard to identify, diagnose, and resolve. When things escalate, major incidents can cost companies hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. With Autoptic, teams have a better chance of avoiding production performance, availability, and financial problems that degrade over time.”

The company has taken a strategic and streamlined approach to capital. To support ongoing product development and customer success, 23 individual investors, along with the two Autoptic co-founders, have collectively committed approximately $1M using a standard YC Safe set at Carta 50th percentile terms. The company’s seed investors span former and current CEOs, CTOs, operators (e.g. CFOs), and professionals (e.g. venture capitalists). Their backgrounds include organizations like Accenture, Google, Datadog, the Linux Foundation, PagerDuty, and Riverbed Technologies. 14 are in Austin, TX where Autoptic is headquartered. Current Autoptic outside investors are:

• CEOs: Andrew Busey, Damon Edwards, Dave Panos, Nacho de Marco, Scott Harmon, Terry Angelos, William Chan. 

• CTOs: Brian Gambs, Chris Aniszczyk, Dan Van Tran, Will Ballard.

• Operators: Cihan Hircin, Dimitri Vlachos, Dustin Kirkland, Ernest Mueller, Greg O’Reilly, Ilan Rabinovitch, Jim Offerdahl, Scott Buxton.

• Professionals: Allen Morgan, Aneesh Desai, Aziz Gilani, Rob Taylor. 

“Autoptic’s technology, product, and industry acumen have the potential to be a game changer in the DevOps space,” said Damon Edwards. “Their software for extending and increasing the value of observability tools is particularly smart.”

"Modern reliability is a firehose of tools and telemetry," stated Dan Van Tran. "Autoptic’s approach to mapping change impact across the full stack is exactly the kind of system that engineering teams need to stop incidents before they happen.”

“Autoptic’s capital efficiency and customer-centric pricing model, including no usage or variable costs, are impressive,” offered Scott Buxton. “The team’s financial strategy is differentiated and compelling, giving them a clear market advantage.”

The company has earmarked approximately $500K more via the current Safe structure for qualified individual investors. With its differentiated capital, operations, and deployment strategy, Autoptic is able to offer innovative, attractive, and predictable pricing options to its customers.  The company is hiring for several positions, including FDEs in North and Latin America, as listed on the Autoptic Jobs page.

About Autoptic

Autoptic provides change resilience agents that enable large software engineering teams to detect, diagnose, and repair lurking production problems before they escalate into major incidents. The product integrates with 10+ leading DevOps tools that spawn massive and diverse telemetry sets. Its analytics technology combines PQL (Performance Query Language) with AI. It builds a complete view of system states that complements existing observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident management tools. It maximizes customer value via a modern BYOC approach and FDE telemetry experts. With Autoptic, CTOs and their teams democratize operational briefs while keeping observability costs in check. Autoptic is backed by 20+ investors, spanning CEOs, CTOs, operators, and professionals. It is headquartered in Austin, TX.