InsightFinder AI got started when founder and CEO Dr Helen Gu, a computer science professor at NC State University, spent a sabbatical year as a visiting scientist at Google. She had co-published two key papers on the topic of using unsupervised learning for IT monitoring and management: ( “UBL: Unsupervised Behavior Learning for Predicting Anomalies in Virtualized Cloud Systems” and “Cloudscale: Elastic Resource Scaling for Multi-Tenant Cloud Systems”). While at Google she helped the technology giant evaluate the patented unsupervised behavior learning (UBL) algorithm she had co-invented. When Google licensed the technology, a company was born. InsightFinder AI was launched in 2016 with a highly competitive small business research and innovation award from the National Science Foundation.

“The AI engine can constantly learn and become smarter and smarter, just like a human. Our AI platform is also organically growing, and we aggregate a lot of knowledge to help people extract insights out of massive amounts of data,” Gu said, “It becomes more powerful to learn how to operate IT systems and also improves efficiency.”

The core of the company’s technology is the Unified Intelligence Engine (UIE), which is the underlying driver of the InsightFinder AI’s products. Use of the first product – IT Observability – continues to grow. In 2024 the company introduced its second product – AI Observability – to apply the UIE technology to AI Models – helping to identify and remediate model drift, LLM hallucinations, and data quality issues.

InsightFinder AI maintains a deep commitment to research and technical rigor. The core technology is based on more than 90 research papers, and was the result of more than $4.2 million in research grant funding from National Science Foundation, NSA, ARO, Google, IBM, and Cisco.

The company’s goal is to apply cutting-edge AI technologies to improving the robustness of IT and AI systems, and to improve the lives of customers, clients, and the people who build and maintain those systems. “Nobody wants to spend their holidays or nights fighting IT outages and talking on bridge calls,“ said Gu. “AI should work to make our systems better. We want to give time back to our heroes.”

Key Timeline

Jan 2016

Received NSF SBIR Phase 1 Grant to validate the feasibility of automatic anomaly prediction and diagnosis Software as a Service (SaaS) for cloud infrastructures.

Mar 2017

Received NSF SBIR Phase 2 Grant to help acquire initial paying customers.

Apr 2018

Pre-seed equity investment – Eight Roads and Propel X Network.

Dec 2019

First Enterprise Customer!

Jan 2020

Seed equity investment – IDEA Fund Partners, Eight Roads, and Propel X Network.

Oct 2020

Dr Gu and co-authors (from Google, Amazon, and Exotanium) awarded 10-year best paper award at Symposium on Cloud Computing 2020.

Nov 2020

Patent granted for online unsupervised event pattern extraction and holistic root cause analysis for distributed systems.

Aug 2021

Received NSF SBIR Phase 1 Grant to validate the feasibility of prediction-driven incident prevention Software as a Service (SaaS) for cloud and IT infrastructures.

Sep 2022

Series A equity investment – Silicon Value Future Capital, Yu Galaxy, Fellows Fund, Eastlink Capital, IDEA Fund Partners, Acadia Wood Partners, and Eight Roads.

Dec 2023

Start strong partnerships with Dell, Lenovo, Visa and other Fortune 1000 customers.

Oct 2024

Launch of new AI Observability product addressing the problems inherent to large-scale enterprise deployments of ML and LLM models.