Bret Taylor’s Sierra raises $350M at a $10B valuation

Buyers are clearly bullish about former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor’s AI agent startup Sierra.

Sierra, which helps enterprises construct customer support AI brokers, introduced it raised a $350 million funding spherical on Thursday. The spherical, led by earlier investor Greenoaks Capital, values the startup at $10 billion, in line with an organization weblog put up that confirmed an earlier report from Axios on Wednesday.

Sierra was based in early 2024 by Taylor and longtime Google alum Clay Bavor. The corporate claims to have landed a whole lot of shoppers, together with SoFi, Ramp, and Brex, amongst others, in its 18 months of operation.

Sierra has now raised $635 million altogether, together with $110 million that closed in February of final yr led by Sequoia and Benchmark, and a $175 million spherical that closed in October of final yr led by Greenoaks.

Others of its buyers embody ICONIQ and Thrive Capital.

As TechCrunch has beforehand reported, Taylor and Bavor have an extended historical past in customer support tech. Taylor spent practically a decade at Salesforce and years in the past based Quip, which Salesforce purchased for $750 million in the summertime of 2016. Bavor managed Gmail and Google Drive at Google, amongst different consumer-facing merchandise.

Taylor met Bavor whereas at Google, the place he labored earlier than serving as Fb’s CTO for a number of years. At Google, Taylor is broadly credited with serving to to launch Google Maps. Years later, he’d oversee the Twitter board all through Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media website.

Earlier this week, the truth is, Taylor introduced that Sierra is launching its second yr of its so-called APX program, a rotational alternative for latest technical graduates that straight mirrors the Google program that launched each Taylor’s and co-founder Clay Bavor’s careers 20 years in the past.

The hiring announcement stands out in what has turn into an more and more robust job market, significantly as firms assess the facility of AI applied sciences like these Sierra is promoting and their potential affect on workforce wants.

This system targets pc science graduates and says it affords expertise in each agent engineering and product administration. Taylor described the roles as offering what he calls “an irresponsible quantity of accountability” — much like the liberty to construct and launch merchandise that he and Bavor had at Google — with new graduates anticipated to work on a number of product launches throughout their first yr.