When a production system goes down, the first hour is usually spent not fixing the problem but finding it. Engineers jump between dashboards, logs and recent deployments while customers wait. Freshworks, the Nasdaq-listed SaaS company founded in Chennai, wants AI agents to take over that hunt. The company has acquired Robusta Dev, an Israel-based startup that builds AI agents to investigate technology outages, trace their root cause and suggest how to fix them.

Financial terms of the deal, announced on 28 October, were not disclosed. Robusta’s technology will be built into Freshservice, Freshworks’ IT service management (ITSM) platform, and aligned with incident-response platform FireHydrant.

An AI site reliability engineer that is always on call

Freshworks describes Robusta as working like an AI site reliability engineer (SRE). Its approach follows three steps. First, when an anomaly appears, its agents examine monitoring data, infrastructure telemetry and recent code or configuration changes. Next, the engine identifies the likely root cause, maps the “blast radius” across dependent services and shows the evidence behind its conclusion. Finally, it recommends remediation within guardrails the customer defines.

That last point matters for enterprise buyers. According to Freshworks, engineers review and approve any recommended change before it touches production, so humans stay in control of the decisions that carry the most risk.

From diagnosis to prevention

The bigger idea is to connect three pieces that usually sit apart: IT service management, AI-led investigation and incident orchestration. Robusta’s investigations will draw on Freshservice’s business-service context, configuration management database (CMDB) dependencies and change history, so a diagnosis reflects the customer’s own environment. Findings, affected services and suggested fixes will flow into FireHydrant incident timelines and into Slack and Microsoft Teams channels where responders work. After an incident, the data feeds retrospectives and updates Freshservice change guardrails, with the aim of stopping the same failure from happening again.

Solving the cost problem of AI investigations

Robusta was founded in 2021 by Natan Yellin and Arik Alon. It began as a Kubernetes troubleshooting tool and was later rebuilt around agentic AI, through its open-source agent HolmesGPT. In a blog post on the deal, Yellin wrote that running AI investigations on every alert had become too expensive for large enterprises, which pushed the team to find ways to investigate high volumes of alerts economically. Speaking to Inc42, he said the technology lets AI agents work in large enterprise environments where investigating each raw event individually “would be exorbitant from a token cost perspective”.

For Freshworks, the deal deepens a push into AI-powered service operations, an area where ITSM vendors are racing to add agents that do real work rather than just summarise tickets.

Why it matters for Indian CIOs

Indian enterprises, from banks and telecom operators to e-commerce platforms and global capability centres, run increasingly complex, always-on digital estates where even short outages cost revenue and trust. AI agents that can cut the time to find a root cause, while keeping a human approval step, speak directly to that pressure. The deal also shows how agentic AI is moving beyond chat assistants into core IT operations. CIOs evaluating such tools will want clear answers on data access, auditability of each investigation, and how guardrails are set and enforced before an agent is allowed anywhere near production.

Sources: Freshworks announcement (28 October 2026); Robusta blog; The Economic Times; Inc42; The Hindu BusinessLine.

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