AI agent company Sierra, founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, is receiving strong investor interest. The company, which focuses on building customer service AI agents for enterprises, announced on Thursday that it has completed a new round of financing worth $350 million, with the company's valuation reaching $10 billion.
The company's blog post confirmed that this round of financing was led by early investor Greenoaks Capital, and this valuation figure had previously been reported by Axios on Wednesday. Sierra was founded in early 2024 by Taylor and Clay Bavor, a senior Google employee.
The company claims to have hundreds of clients, including well-known companies such as SoFi, Ramp, and Brex, within 18 months of operation. To date, Sierra's total fundraising has reached $635 million. Before this funding round, the company completed a $110 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital and Benchmark in February of last year, and a $175 million funding round led by Greenoaks in October of last year.
Other investors of Sierra include well-known institutions such as ICONIQ and Thrive Capital.
According to a previous report by TechCrunch, Taylor and Bavor both have deep backgrounds in customer service technology. Taylor worked at Salesforce for nearly ten years, and the company he founded, Quip, was acquired by Salesforce for $750 million in the summer of 2016. Bavor was responsible for managing consumer-facing products such as Gmail and Google Drive at Google.
Their collaboration can be traced back to their time at Google. Taylor worked at Google before serving as Chief Technology Officer at Facebook for several years, during which he gained recognition for helping launch Google Maps. Later, he also served as a supervisor on the Twitter board during Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter.
Earlier this week, Taylor announced that Sierra will launch its second year of the APX rotation program, a rotational opportunity aimed at recent technical graduates, directly inspired by a similar Google program that helped Taylor and Bavor start their careers 20 years ago.
This hiring initiative is particularly notable in the current job market environment. The job market is becoming increasingly challenging, and companies are evaluating the impact of Sierra's AI technology and its potential impact on labor demand.
The program primarily targets computer science graduates, offering work experience in both agent engineering and product management. Taylor described these positions as providing "responsibility with little accountability," similar to the freedom Taylor and Bavor had at Google in terms of product development and release. New employees are expected to participate in multiple product launch projects within their first year of employment.
