Sierra raises $950M as competition to own enterprise AI intensifies

Brett Taylor’s AI startup Sierra has raised $950 million in a funding round led by Tiger Global and GV, the company announced Monday, giving it a post-money valuation of more than $15 billion. The funding brings Sierra more than $1 billion in funding, which the company says it will use to become the “world standard” for AI-powered customer experiences.

Like many AI companies, Sierra has wisely been very aggressive in touting its growth in a crowded market. The company says it started a few years ago with just four design partners. Today, the company claims to have more than 40% of Fortune 50 companies as customers, and says agents running on its platform process billions of interactions, from refinancing mortgages to processing insurance claims, managing returns, and facilitating nonprofit fundraising efforts.

In fact, this funding news comes on the heels of similarly impressive revenue growth for Sierra, where the company first announced in late November that it had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue, and then published another post in early February announcing that ARR had reached $150 million.

This pace reflects both the urgency companies feel about AI adoption and the associated costs. Taylor, who is also chairman of OpenAI and former co-CEO of Salesforce, said the best outcome for agent AI is lower costs and increased revenue for customers, but the startup phase before those benefits are realized can be expensive.

That very scenario came up in a conversation at one of TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC events last week. Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga put it plainly in a conversation with this editor, saying that Uber “depleted our (AI) budget” shortly after opening its doors to agent-based AI tools late last year. He also said the company is starting to see meaningful results.

Across a staff of about 8,000 engineers and technical workers, about 10% of all code generated in-house today is generated autonomously, he said, adding, “10% is huge at our size.” As a proof of concept, Uber asked a team to build a new hotel booking integration using only agent workflows. He said work that would normally take a year was completed in six months.

Sierra is also looking to expand what the platform can do beyond customer-facing agents. In April, the company announced Ghostwriter, an “agent-as-a-service” tool designed to build other agents. Users describe what they need in natural language, and Ghostwriter autonomously creates and deploys specialized agents to handle it.

For Taylor, the tool underscores a broader theory he presented at the HumanX conference in San Francisco last month. He argued that many enterprise software tools are rarely used. Employees only need to log in to Workday during onboarding and general registration. The future Sierra and its investors are betting on is one in which people will no longer have to navigate complex systems.