Interfere Raises $5.1M Seed and Expands New York Team to Automate Bug Fixing

Software teams often spend half their engineering capacity maintaining code, diagnosing runtime issues, and triaging production errors rather than building new software. Interfere, founded in 2025 and backed by Y Combinator's S25 batch, is building what it terms the self-healing layer of the internet to address that drain. As reported by Dealroom, the New York-based startup raised a $5.1M seed round to help teams autonomously detect, diagnose, and resolve production bugs.

Interfere is backed by Hummingbird Ventures, Designer Fund, Vercel, Worldbuild, and Otherwise Fund. The company operates with seven employees in New York City and is actively adding engineering, design, marketing, and sales talent across eight open roles.

Moving Past Dashboards to Autonomous Remediation

Interfere monitors software in production to proactively identify defects, assess their business impact, and autonomously write fixes. Most post-deployment tooling stops at aggregation, forcing engineers to parse logs, interpret Slack alerts, and trace stack traces manually.

In an interview with Designer Fund, founder and CEO Luke Shiels explained the core friction that prompted him to start the company. "The stat that stuck out to me was like 50% of engineers' time on average is spent like on maintenance versus building that new," Shiels said. "Post-deployment, the software development life cycle experience would like fall off a cliff. ... I want to live in the pre-deployment stage, I want to build cool features and I want to iterate and like build great products, but I'm forced to live in the post-deployment world of like keeping the thing afloat."

Rather than presenting logs solely to specialized infrastructure engineers, Interfere designs its interfaces so product managers and designers can also interpret production health. In the video interview, Shiels noted that the interface works as an onion: non-technical team members can view which bugs exist, which customers they affect, and the revenue associated with those accounts, while software engineers can peel back those layers to inspect technical root causes.

Founder Background and Early Development

Shiels built an unconventional background before launching Interfere. After finishing high school in Ireland, he moved to Poland in 2020 to train as an airline commercial pilot cadet. While navigating flight school disruptions during lockdowns, he worked remotely as a self-taught designer and developer, taking on contracting projects to cover living expenses.

He transitioned full-time into tech startups, working as a founding product engineer at Tabs between 2023 and 2024, followed by a tenure as founding design engineer at Delphi from 2024 to 2025. At both startups, the recurring cognitive burden of firefighting and production triage convinced him that codebases needed automated remediation layers rather than more monitoring dashboards.

Engineering the Core Platform in New York

With eight roles listed at its New York City headquarters, Interfere is scaling its core platform infrastructure and GTM operations. All roles are full-time and on-site.

On the backend, the company is hiring a Software Engineer, Data ($160,000 to $250,000) to build high-throughput ingestion, real-time stream processing, and storage systems capable of querying high volumes of runtime traces. The intelligence layer relies on a Software Engineer, AI/ML ($160,000 to $250,000) who will build reasoning agents, evaluation frameworks, and inference pipelines that evaluate real codebases, traces, and logs to diagnose bugs before users encounter them.

To bridge runtime systems and customer interfaces, the Founding Product Engineer ($150,000 to $250,000) will architect core detection systems and design developer-facing tools. Interfere is also establishing its foundational security protocols through its first Security Engineer ($160,000 to $250,000), who will harden infrastructure, ship internal security features, and run compliance programs including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR.

Beyond core engineering, Interfere is building out its design and go-to-market teams. A Founding Designer ($150,000 to $250,000) will lead product design from customer interviews through shipped interface components, while a Technical Content Marketer ($110,000 to $150,000) will turn engineering work and product updates into technical publications. Outbound sales will start with a Founding BDR ($80,000 to $90,000) working alongside the Head of Strategy and Growth to prospect accounts and book introductory meetings.

Open Roles at Interfere

See all open roles at Interfere