Rebhav Bharadwaj, the co-founder and CEO of Dodge AI , has his mother to thank for the business venture he launched earlier this year. Her insistence that he work for her following the completion of his studies inspired the launch of Dodge, which is today unveiling a $2.65 million funding round.

“My mom had a consultancy business helping large enterprises with systems integration and when I left university, she persuaded me to help her out,” Bharadwaj recalls. “It wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to do and it was actually a very frustrating job because many of those enterprises were really struggling with their IT systems – making the simplest of changes would often take days or weeks.”

The experience convinced Bharadwaj that there had to be a better way to manage the large and often fragmented systems infrastructure of enterprises. San Francisco-based Dodge represents his endeavour to solve the problems that were so frustrating when working in the family business.

The company says its platform effectively acts as the control panel through which businesses can manage enterprise applications such as SAP, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. In the first instance, the platform is maintenance orientated, with tools that enable IT managers to identify the causes of problems more quickly, with fixes suggested. In time, the company sees scope to expand the platform so that IT functions can use it to manage all their broader IT changes and updates without putting system stability at risk.

That includes the launch of agentic AI applications, says Aditya Thakur, co-founder and CTO of Dodge. He argues that the models on which these agents depend often struggle with the intricacies of large enterprises and their idiosyncracies – and that automated system integration will therefore have a critical role to play in adoption and implementation.

“Frontier models are incredibly capable but enterprise adoption still requires significant hill climbing,” Thakur says. “We capture the necessary rules and exceptions for this – while self-healing your systems instead of an endless transformation project.”

Dodge argues that its approach represents a substantial break from the past. Currently, most enterprises maintain their IT systems through large consultancies operating with large teams, often offshored, who manage everything from change requests to incident response. But this can be a slow and cumbersome process, and also creates problems for the future as the consultancies put fixes in place undocumented, adding to the enterprise’s technical debt.

“For a long time, the only way to maintain enterprise systems was to add more people,” Bharadwaj adds. “We believe long-horizon agents can change that: Dodge AI gives enterprises the ability to continuously improve and heal their mission critical systems so incidents can be resolved faster, technical debt can be understood, and the knowledge trapped inside maintenance work can become the foundation for future transformation.”

The market opportunity is certainly significant. The global systems integration market was worth around $22 billion last year according to analysis from ResearchandMarkets but is expected to grow at a rate of almost 20% a year to be worth almost $66 billion by 2031.

The large consultancies that Dodge hopes to disrupt will continue to fight for a large chunk of that market, with businesses such as Accenture, TCS and IBM remaining very powerful. Other start-ups and scale-ups have also begun to target parts of this market.

However, Dodge’s investors believe the business is in a strong position to carve out a niche for itself - and the company has already signed up around a dozen customers, including several large publicly-listed businesses. Today’s funding round is jointly led by Accel and the venture arm of Google, with participation from Schema Ventures, New Build Ventures, Antler and angels from the SAP ecosystem.

“Application maintenance is one of the largest and least modernized categories in enterprise technology,” says Prayank Swaroop, investor at Accel. “Dodge AI is taking on the work that keeps the world’s most important systems running every day. By starting with maintenance, the team is building the context layer enterprises need before agents can safely operate in production.”