Freshworks, the Nasdaq-listed maker of customer and IT service software, has acquired Robusta, an Israeli startup that builds HolmesGPT, an open-source AI agent that investigates production incidents and looks for their root causes. Robusta announced the deal on its blog on October 28, 2026, in a post titled "Robusta is joining Freshworks".
Neither company disclosed the price or other financial terms, Entrackr and Dealroom reported. Freshworks plans to bring Robusta's technology into Freshservice, its IT service management platform, and combine it with the incident orchestration tools of FireHydrant, which it agreed to buy in December 2025, according to Dealroom.
For Robusta's users, the company said little would change right away. "In practice, little changes today," the post said, adding that the team would keep hiring and expected to ship new product features faster, with more resources behind it as part of Freshworks.
What Robusta built
Robusta was started in 2021 with the aim of helping engineers work out more quickly why their production systems had failed. Its first product focused on Kubernetes, the container orchestration system, and the company said it worked well enough there that it began looking for ways to apply the approach to any kind of production problem.
When large language models arrived, the company decided to bet its future on agentic AI and rebuilt its platform from scratch as an AI agent, HolmesGPT. The post acknowledged that the choice was not obvious at the time, because models were unreliable and prone to inventing details. Robusta said it expected accuracy problems to shrink as the models improved, and that its results did become far more accurate as both the models and its own tooling got better.
HolmesGPT is now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project, released under the Apache 2.0 licence. Its GitHub repository had about 3,700 stars at the time of the deal, and its README says the project was originally created by Robusta "with major contributions from Microsoft."
The agent queries live observability data from several sources in a loop to trace the cause of an incident, and has a mode that runs in the background and checks for problems on its own. Its README lists built-in connections to Kubernetes, Helm and ArgoCD, to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, to monitoring and logging tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Loki, Elasticsearch and Splunk, and to Jira, GitHub, PagerDuty, OpsGenie and Slack. By design it has read-only access to the systems it inspects.
The cost problem
Robusta said that as its investigations improved, a different obstacle appeared. For enterprise customers, running an AI investigation on every alert cost too much. Most were willing to pay for it on critical incidents but not on the long tail of low-priority alerts, even though ignoring those alerts meant missing early signs of trouble.
The company said it put heavy investment into this and worked out how to investigate large volumes of alerts with what it called "non-linear token costs", while keeping the same level of accuracy. In other words, the cost of running the model would not rise in proportion to the number of alerts. Dealroom reported that co-founder and chief executive Natan Yellin pointed to that ability to cut the computing resources needed to investigate large volumes of operational events as a key part of the technology.
Why Freshworks is buying
Robusta said Freshworks approached it, and that the two sides found early in their talks that they were working toward the same goal: production systems that are proactive and fix themselves. The startup concluded it could get there faster inside Freshworks than on its own. The post said its founders had spent much of the past few months with the Freshworks team.
Entrackr reported that Freshworks wants to use Robusta's AI-based incident investigation to help organisations find the root causes of IT disruptions and resolve them more efficiently, and to widen the AI capabilities in Freshservice's IT operations offering. Dealroom described the combined aim as speeding up resolution and preventing outages from recurring.
Freshworks is profitable on a reported basis. Entrackr noted that the company reported revenue of $237.4 million for the quarter ended June 2026, up 16% from a year earlier, and a GAAP net profit of $3.2 million, compared with a net loss of $1.7 million a year before.
A run of IT operations deals
Robusta is the third IT operations company Freshworks has moved to buy in less than a year. On December 15, 2025 it signed an agreement to acquire FireHydrant, which sells AI-powered incident management software covering on-call scheduling, major-incident response and AI-assisted retrospectives. On October 12, 2026 it signed a definitive agreement to acquire Torii, a SaaS management company with engineering roots in Israel, to extend Freshservice into governing what companies spend on software and AI tools. Freshworks did not disclose the price of either deal.
Taken together, the purchases give Freshservice tools for managing incidents, for investigating what caused them and for tracking software and AI spending. Robusta's funding history and current headcount were not reported in the coverage of the deal, and neither company said how HolmesGPT's open-source project would be run under Freshworks.
