Moogsoft Inc., a startup competing in an emerging market segment aimed at applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to information technology operations, today announced the completion of a late-stage $40 million funding round led by Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s growth equity division.

A half-dozen returning investors chipped into the Series D round as well. Among the participants was ST Telemedia, an arm of Singapore’s Temasek Holdings Pvt Ltd., a national wealth fund that regularly invests in technology startups.

Moogsoft will use the capital to step up feature development and marketing efforts around its flagship platform, Moogsoft AIOps. AIOps is a term originated by market researcher Gartner Inc. to describe the application of AI technologies to IT operations.

The software uses machine learning to free up time that administrators normally spend on repetitive manual chores for fixing operational issues. It incorporates several patented technologies designed to automate various aspects of the workflow. 

One of them is a “noise reduction” mechanism that Moogsoft said can filter more than 90 percent of the routine operational logs generated by infrastructure monitoring tools. The result, according to the startup, is that administrators can shift their attention from tedious alert analysis to tackling potential problems.

Moogsoft turns the important logs that do pass its filters into “Situations,” automatically generated reports about the issue at hand. The information is presented in a visual form with a timeline of the individual events that led up the problem.

During the troubleshooting process, yet another machine learning component can help administrators understand the full picture. Moogsoft AIOps flags correlations, such if there’s a sudden performance drop across multiple systems,  and brings up information about any past incidents that may have demonstrated similar characteristics. This includes a list of the steps that administrators took to resolve them.

Moogsoft claims to have more than doubled revenue in the past year thanks to new customer wins. The startup counts Cisco Systems Inc., T-Mobile USA Inc., Intuit Inc. and other major tech firms among its users.

Moogsoft’s investors are clearly counting on the company to maintain this growth in the coming years. In a forecast for the AIOps segment, Gartner has predicted that 40 percent of all large enterprises will use machine learning as part of their troubleshooting efforts by 2022.

Image: Moogsoft