Bret Taylor’s Sierra Raises $350m At A $10b Valuation

Investors are intelligibly bullish astir erstwhile Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor’s AI supplier startup Sierra.

Sierra, which helps enterprises build customer work AI agents, announced it raised a $350 cardinal backing round connected Thursday. The round, led by earlier investor Greenoaks Capital, values nan startup astatine $10 billion, according to a institution blog station that confirmed an earlier report from Axios connected Wednesday.

Sierra was founded successful early 2024 by Taylor and longtime Google alum Clay Bavor. The institution claims to person landed hundreds of customers, including SoFi, Ramp, and Brex, among others, successful its 18 months of operation.

Sierra has now raised $635 cardinal altogether, including a $110 million that closed successful February of past twelvemonth led by Sequoia and Benchmark, and a $175 cardinal round that closed successful October of past twelvemonth led by Greenoaks.

Others of its investors see ICONIQ and Thrive Capital.

As TechCrunch has antecedently reported, Taylor and Bavor person a agelong history successful customer work tech. Taylor spent astir a decade astatine Salesforce and years agone founded Quip, which Salesforce bought for $750 cardinal successful nan summertime of 2016. Bavor managed Gmail and Google Drive astatine Google, among different consumer-facing products.

Taylor met Bavor while astatine Google, wherever he worked earlier serving arsenic Facebook’s CTO for respective years. At Google, Taylor is wide credited pinch helping to motorboat Google Maps. Years later, he’d oversee nan Twitter committee passim nan societal media site’s takeover by Elon Musk.

Earlier this week, successful fact, Taylor announced that Sierra is launching its 2nd twelvemonth of its alleged APX program, a rotational opportunity for caller method graduates that straight mirrors nan Google programme that launched some Taylor’s and co-founder Clay Bavor’s careers 2 decades ago.

The hiring announcement stands retired successful what has go an progressively reliable occupation market, peculiarly arsenic companies measure nan powerfulness of AI technologies for illustration those Sierra is trading and their imaginable effect connected workforce needs.

The programme targets machine subject graduates and offers acquisition successful some supplier engineering and merchandise management, pinch participants building AI agents for companies crossed industries including retail, healthcare, financial services, and telecoms. Taylor described nan domiciled arsenic providing what he calls “an irresponsible magnitude of responsibility” — akin to nan state to build and motorboat products that he and Bavor had astatine Google — pinch caller graduates expected to activity connected aggregate merchandise launches during their first year.