Sierra Raises $350M, Valued at $10B: Former Salesforce Co-CEO Bret Taylor’s AI Agent Startup Secures Major Funding for Customer Service Innovation
In a significant development for the AI industry, startup Sierra, specializing in creating customer service AI agents for enterprises, has successfully secured a $350 million funding round. The financing round was spearheaded by earlier investor Greenoaks Capital and values the company at an impressive $10 billion, as confirmed in a company blog post on Thursday. This announcement follows an earlier report from Axios on Wednesday.
Founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and long-term Google veteran Clay Bavor in early 2024, Sierra has already amassed a considerable client base within its 18-month tenure. Notable clients include SoFi, Ramp, Brex, and others.
With this latest round of funding, Sierra’s total capital raised now stands at $635 million. Previous investments include a $110 million series in February of the preceding year, led by Sequoia and Benchmark, as well as a $175 million series in October of the same year, led by Greenoaks.
Investors in Sierra also include ICONIQ and Thrive Capital.
Taylor and Bavor bring extensive experience in customer service technology to the table. Taylor spent close to a decade at Salesforce before founding Quip, which was acquired by Salesforce for $750 million in summer 2016. Bavor oversaw Gmail and Google Drive at Google, among other consumer-facing products.
Taylor met Bavor during his tenure at Google, where he later served as Facebook’s CTO for several years. Notably, Taylor played a crucial role in launching Google Maps during his time there, and subsequently oversaw the Twitter board throughout Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform.
Earlier this week, Sierra announced the launch of its second year of the APX program, a rotational opportunity for recent technical graduates that mirrors the Google program that kick-started both Taylor’s and co-founder Clay Bavor’s careers two decades ago. This hiring initiative stands out in today’s competitive job market, particularly as companies assess the power and potential impact of AI technologies like those offered by Sierra on workforce needs.
The APX program targets computer science graduates and offers experience in both agent engineering and product management. According to Taylor, these roles provide an “irresponsible amount of responsibility,” similar to the freedom to build and launch products that he and Bavor experienced at Google, with new graduates expected to work on multiple product launches during their first year.
