New Relic, the Intelligent Observability Company, announced New Relic for Startups, a program that pairs free observability platform access with direct engineering support for early-stage companies building on AI. Built to support early-stage growth, the program gives Series A and earlier startups the technology and resources required to confidently launch and acquire customers.

As startups build on LLMs, agents, and AI-generated code, they ship fast across their whole stack—typically with no observability platform team to catch what code review misses. Without deep stack visibility, this accelerated speed often introduces hidden operational vulnerabilities. According to the 2026 State of AI Coding, while 94% of leaders rate AI-generated code as higher quality (versus human-authored code) at the time of review, 78% report more incidents once the code actually ships. An untraceable system outage during a high-profile product launch or funding round can quickly stall a startup's momentum. New Relic for Startups helps reduce this risk, equipping lean founding teams with enterprise-grade observability so they can scale confidently to gain market traction. 

"Scaling at the speed of AI means shipping faster than ever, but you can't scale what you can't see," said Jemiah Sius, Vice President of Market Strategy and Developer Relations at New Relic. “Growth requires absolute clarity into how your stack performs when the pressure is on. We're not just handing out credits. We're bringing our technology and forward-deployed engineers together to give founders the observability foundation they need to launch confidently and scale without limits."

The program is available to vetted, early-stage startups. Beyond launch, participants get the architecture guidance and peer community that help a small team scale and reduce the operational debt that slows them down later, and a clear path into a standard New Relic relationship as they grow.

"Scaling our product means our infrastructure has to perform flawlessly when it matters most—even without a massive SRE team behind us," said Sir Charles Hill, Chief Operating Officer of UseBump. "Joining the New Relic for Startups program will give us the enterprise-grade visibility and expert guidance we need to stay reliable as we scale. We don't just view New Relic as a vendor, but as a long-term partner in our growth."