The software industry has spent the past several years focused on accelerating development through artificial intelligence. AI coding assistants can now generate code in seconds, helping engineering teams deliver features faster than traditional development cycles allowed.
But generating software is only part of the equation. Once applications are deployed, engineers still face the challenge of understanding how that code behaves in production, and why it sometimes fails.
Hud is positioning that challenge as the foundation of a new software category it calls Runtime Intelligence. To help establish that market, the company has appointed Shai Alani as Vice President of Marketing.
Beyond Code Generation
AI has fundamentally changed software creation by reducing the time required to write code. According to Hud, however, the industry’s tooling has not evolved at the same pace in understanding production behavior.
Conventional observability platforms can alert teams when an application encounters an issue, but determining the precise cause often requires combing through logs and integrating information from multiple sources. AI coding agents face similar limitations because they can analyze source code without necessarily understanding how it executes in real production workloads.
Hud’s platform is designed to bridge that disconnect by providing function-level production evidence and forensic context whenever software encounters problems. The goal is to enable engineers and AI coding agents to investigate incidents, identify root causes, validate changes, and deploy fixes with greater confidence.
“AI has changed the speed of software creation, but production is still where code proves itself,” said Roee Adler, Co-founder and CEO of Hud. “The next major category in the AI SDLC is Runtime Intelligence: production behavior resolved to the function level, coupled with deep forensics when things go wrong, so humans and agents can understand, fix, and validate software with confidence. Shai brings the experience we need to build that category and scale Hud into a defining company for AI-native engineering teams.”
A Marketing Strategy Focused on Category Creation
Hud’s latest executive appointment reflects more than an expansion of its leadership team. Alani will oversee global marketing strategy while leading the company’s efforts around category creation, brand development, and demand generation.
His background includes serving as VP of Marketing at Lightrun, as well as previous leadership roles at Coralogix and Aporia. At Hud, his responsibilities will include communicating why runtime evidence may become an increasingly important component of AI-assisted software development.
Alani believes the industry is approaching a point where producing software quickly is no longer the primary challenge.
“Runtime Intelligence is the missing layer in the AI software stack,” said Shai Alani, VP Marketing at Hud. “AI has made it easy to generate code, but it has not made it any easier to stand behind that code once it is running in production, where reliability is actually decided. That gap is fast becoming one of the defining problems for AI-native engineering teams, and it is exactly the kind of category you build a company around. That is why I joined Hud, and it is the story I am excited to take to market.”
Integrating Production Into the AI Development Loop
Hud says its Runtime Intelligence platform operates continuously in production through a runtime code sensor that runs alongside every function. When software behaves unexpectedly, the platform captures detailed forensic information that can help explain what occurred while providing the evidence needed to validate a solution.
Rather than requiring developers to reconstruct events from scattered telemetry, Hud aims to bring production behavior directly into the software development process. The company says this allows engineering teams to resolve incidents more efficiently while giving AI coding agents a stronger factual foundation for recommending fixes.
The platform is already deployed across millions of production services at organizations including Monday.com, Lemonade, Axonius, and Cyera. Hud has also raised $21 million in funding led by Aleph and SquarePeg.
As AI continues reshaping software engineering, attention is increasingly shifting from how quickly code can be written to how confidently it can be deployed and maintained. Hud’s latest leadership appointment underscores its effort to define Runtime Intelligence as an essential part of that next phase.
