The rise of AI coding tools promised faster, easier development. Instead, it’s also triggered a flood of new code — and with it, a surge in bugs, crashes, and costly mistakes. Now, Lightrun, an Israeli startup focused on observability and debugging, has raised $70 million in Series B funding. The round highlights not just the growing need for smarter code management tools but also Lightrun’s success in answering that demand.
Accel and Insight Partners co-led the round, joined by Citi, Glilot Capital, GTM Capital, and Sorenson Capital. This latest raise brings Lightrun’s total funding to $110 million. While the startup isn’t disclosing its valuation, its momentum is clear.
Lightrun counts major companies like Citi, ADP, AT&T, ICE/NYSE, Inditex, Microsoft, Priceline, Salesforce, and SAP among its clients. Citi’s involvement is strategic, signaling strong faith in the platform’s capabilities.
The launch of Lightrun’s Runtime Autonomous AI Debugger in July 2024 was a turning point. Built for integration within developers’ IDEs, the tool uses AI to spot and fix problems before they hit production. As AI-generated code volume grows, so does the risk of errors — and Lightrun’s timing couldn’t have been better.
Since then, Lightrun says revenue has grown more than fourfold. Accel partner Andrei Brasoveanu, who had been watching Lightrun for years, said the company’s acceleration “all because of AI” convinced him to invest.
CEO and co-founder Ilan Peleg knows a thing or two about perfect timing. Before entering tech, he was a champion middle-distance runner, ranked among Europe’s top 16. That sense of pacing and precision now guides Lightrun’s strategy.
Peleg points out that while many companies, including giants like Datadog and AppDynamics, offer observability tools, few tackle the full challenge: predicting how new code will behave alongside existing systems, and fixing problems before they occur — all without disrupting operations.
“Code is becoming cheap, but bugs are expensive,” he said.
The problem, he adds, has reached a breaking point. Developers can now ship more code faster thanks to AI. But when something goes wrong, fixing it remains painfully manual and slow.
That’s where Lightrun stands out. Its platform monitors code inside the IDE, simulating how it will perform in real-world conditions. If risks are detected, it tweaks the code automatically — preventing costly crashes and downtime.
“This is the part where we are unique,” said Peleg.
There are plenty of future paths for Lightrun. It could build more cybersecurity-focused tools or move even closer to the code creation stage to catch bugs even earlier. But for now, Peleg says the company will stay focused on strengthening its presence within the IDE.
“Everything that poses risk to resilience, we are mitigating,” he said.
As for developing AI code assistants? Peleg says it’s on the horizon but not a current priority. Fixing production issues, he notes, is already a massive and complex task.
With between 30% and 60% of all production problems now traced to code — whether written by humans or machines — Lightrun’s mission is clear: observe everything, fix everything, no matter how the code is created.
And with $70 million in fresh capital, they are well-positioned to win that race.
