Nasdaq-listed software-as-a-service (SaaS) company Freshworks has acquired Israel-based artificial intelligence startup Robusta Dev to strengthen the AI capabilities of its IT service management platform, Freshservice. Robusta develops AI agents that investigate technology outages, identify their root causes, and recommend corrective actions. The companies have not disclosed the financial terms of the acquisition. Robusta co-founders Natan Yellin and Arik Alon, along with the startup’s wider team, will join Freshworks.
Founded in 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham and Shanmugam Krishnasamy, Freshworks provides cloud-based software for customer service, sales, and IT service management. Through this acquisition, the company aims to bring AI-powered incident investigation into its existing enterprise IT solutions.
Freshworks plans to integrate Robusta’s technology into Freshservice and connect it with FireHydrant, an incident response platform it acquired earlier this year. This integration will bring infrastructure analysis, IT service management, and incident response together within a unified set of workflows, helping businesses investigate and resolve technology disruptions more efficiently.
Founded in 2021 by Yellin, its CEO, and Alon, Robusta positions itself as an AI site reliability engineer (SRE). Its software investigates service disruptions by examining incidents in a manner similar to an on-call engineer, helping technical teams identify problems and determine appropriate solutions.
Robusta’s AI agents analyse monitoring data, infrastructure telemetry, and recent code or configuration changes to identify the causes of outages. They also assess the impact on dependent services and recommend corrective measures. However, engineers retain control over production environments and must review and approve proposed actions before implementing changes.
The startup’s investigation engine, Holmes, powers its approach to AI-driven troubleshooting. Yellin also leads the development of HolmesGPT, an open-source AI agent designed to troubleshoot cloud-native systems. The project was accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox on 8 October 2025.
Robusta supports Kubernetes and legacy infrastructure systems while integrating with more than 50 monitoring and data sources, including Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Its customers include Playtika, Betsson, NetApp, Bottomline, Fireflies.ai and Infineon.
“LLMs are fantastic at troubleshooting incidents. Our technology lets AI Agents do that effectively in large enterprise environments, where there are so many raw events that investigating each one individually would be exorbitant from a token cost perspective,” Yellin said.
He added that joining Freshworks “gives us the scale and platform to bring that experience to engineering teams everywhere, while keeping humans firmly in control of decisions that touch production.”
Technology outages often require IT and engineering teams to analyse information from multiple sources, including monitoring platforms, alert logs, ticket histories, and software deployment records. Freshworks said this manual process can delay diagnosis and increase the likelihood of recurring incidents.
Under the planned integration, Robusta will use Freshservice’s business service information, configuration management database (CMDB) dependencies, and change histories to trace the origins of disruptions. Its investigation findings, including affected services and recommended fixes, will then feed into FireHydrant’s incident timelines and collaboration tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Freshworks expects the integration to reduce alert fatigue by consolidating multiple notifications associated with a failing service into a single investigated incident. This approach could help technical teams prioritise critical problems and reduce the time spent examining repetitive alerts.
Furthermore, the companies plan to use insights from resolved incidents to improve future incident management. Findings could inform FireHydrant retrospectives and strengthen change-management controls within Freshservice. In addition, recurring incident patterns could be converted into automated checks that run after software deployments, helping teams identify potential issues earlier.
The Robusta acquisition marks the third company Freshworks has moved to acquire in 2026, with all three deals focused on strengthening its IT business.
On 1 January 2026, Freshworks completed its acquisition of US-based incident management company FireHydrant for approximately $88.7 million in cash, including cash acquired, according to the company’s quarterly filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. While FireHydrant helps organisations coordinate responses to outages, Robusta adds AI-powered investigation capabilities to identify the underlying causes.
On 12 October, Freshworks also signed a definitive agreement to acquire Torii, a software management platform founded in 2017. Torii tracks software and AI usage, licences and spending, including AI token consumption. Freshworks expects the transaction to close in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions.
Freshworks began its recent acquisition strategy in 2024, when it agreed to purchase IT asset management company Device42 for $230 million. The deal marked its first acquisition since its 2021 stock market listing. The announcement also coincided with the appointment of Dennis Woodside as CEO, while founder Girish Mathrubootham transitioned to the role of executive chairman.
