Raindrop Raises $15M Seed Led by Lightspeed to Monitor AI Agents
Raindrop, the monitoring platform for AI agents, announced $15M in seed funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, as reported in the Wall Street Journal. The round includes participation from Figma Ventures, Vercel Ventures, and YC, along with founders of Replit (Amjad Masad and Michele Castata), Cognition (Walden Yan), Framer (Koen Bok and Joen van Dijk), Speak (Andrew Hsu), and Notion (Akshay Kothari). Pioneer Fund was an early pre-seed investor.
Founded in 2023 by Alexis Gauba, Ben Hylak, and Zubin Koticha, Raindrop has 6 employees based in San Francisco. Alexis and Zubin are second-time founders whose previous company, Opyn, was acquired by Coinbase. Ben was an engineer at Apple before joining Apple's Human Interface Design team where he worked for four years.
Raindrop is building "Sentry for AI agents" - monitoring infrastructure that catches when AI agents fail silently in production. AI agents present unique monitoring challenges compared to traditional software. Failures in AI systems are often "silent," meaning they may not produce standard exceptions or errors, which makes issue detection more difficult for engineering teams.
"AI agents are more capable than ever. They're reasoning longer, using more tools, and connecting to MCP servers. Some agents now run autonomously for hours," said Raindrop CEO Zubin Koticha. "Traditional testing methods, like evals, aren't capable of handling the complexity of these long trajectories. This leaves engineering teams in the dark - unable to discover or track issues. Raindrop is the first monitoring platform to solve this problem."
To discover hidden issues, Raindrop's AI agents work in the background to triage and investigate potential issue patterns. When a new issue is detected, like the agent encouraging toxic user behavior, Raindrop collects information on the issue and generates step-by-step explanations of what happened.
"We keep seeing AI engineering teams struggling with agent failures in production, and traditional evals are not really helping. We invested in Raindrop because they defined monitoring for AI agents."
— Bucky Moore, Partner at Lightspeed
Raindrop works with frontier AI customers processing millions of events each day to help quickly discover, monitor and resolve critical issues. AI agents are increasingly entrusted with high-stakes tasks and deployed across critical sectors like healthcare and financial services. Recent headlines have been flooded by issues like ChatGPT encouraging users to stop taking medication or Air Canada being sued because their chatbot promised refunds they couldn't honor.
The funding will enable Raindrop to meet enterprise demand, and continue defining the frontier of production monitoring and issue detection for AI agents.