Accel and Google Back Dodge AI's Ambitions to Automate Enterprise Software Maintenance with Agents

Dodge AI Inc., a startup, has secured $2.65 million in seed funding from Accel and the Google AI Futures Fund, along with participation from Schema Ventures, New Build Ventures, Antler, and several angel investors from SAP SE’s ecosystem. This investment aims to disrupt the ‘enterprise firefighting’ industry, which is valued at around $600 billion. The industry has emerged specifically to maintain corporate software platforms such as SAP and Salesforce, which are incredibly complex and require extensive upkeep to ensure they function properly.

Enterprise software installations form the backbone of most large enterprises today. However, every platform is unique, with organizations adapting them over time through thousands of custom rules, company-specific configurations, and workarounds. This results in many companies hiring large systems integrators like Accenture Plc or IBM Corp., which assign teams of 20 to 50 people to handle support tickets, upgrades, and everyday operations.

Dodge AI co-founder and Chief Executive Rebhav Bharadwaj acknowledges that this model has not failed but is inefficient. Over the years, hundreds of fixes may go undocumented while customizations pile up, leading to technical debt compounding over time. According to Bharadwaj, companies often become reliant on systems integrators they hired to help them understand and operate their own software.

The startup’s solution involves developing a ‘control plane’ for enterprise software maintenance that is controlled by artificial intelligence agents. These agents can be overlaid across various platforms like SAP, Salesforce, or Microsoft Dynamics to analyze the deployment, grasp customizations, and configurations. The goal is to automate maintenance going forward.

Bharadwaj claims that Dodge AI’s control plane can identify system failures’ root causes, recommend fixes, and handle maintenance issues faster than human teams. Most importantly, it documents all changes, exceptions, and custom logic implemented, helping organizations understand their IT infrastructure. This approach aims to continuously improve and heal mission-critical systems so incidents are resolved quickly, technical debt is understood, and knowledge trapped in maintenance work becomes the foundation for future transformation.

At its core, Dodge AI understands enterprise software installations by creating an ‘exception intelligence context graph,’ which connects business processes, ERP configurations, and legacy systems. Bharadwaj emphasizes that these exceptions explain why separate warehouses may allocate inventory differently or one pricing rule overrides another. The startup’s agents work to capture and document all this logic, building a centralized source of truth guiding their maintenance work.

Dodge AI has already convinced several large enterprises to drop human consultants in favor of its AI agents. Although it doesn’t name these customers, the company is handling hundreds of queries per hour, resolving issues that would normally take hours or days to fix within minutes. For instance, it helped one customer identify a warehouse loading failure caused by an incorrect Goods Receipt Note across multiple systems and fixed the problem in mere minutes.

In another example, Dodge AI optimized a SAP inventory planning process for one of its customers, making it 132 times faster than before. Moving forward, the startup wants to do more than just help enterprises maintain their software; it also aims to accelerate digital transformations by understanding custom logic and preventing critical systems from being broken during modernization efforts.

Accel investor Prayank Swaroop notes that application maintenance is one of the largest yet least modernized segments in the enterprise technology industry. He believes Dodge AI’s approach addresses this issue, building a context layer needed before agents can safely operate in production.