Former Coatue partner raises $65M seed round for AI startup

Another startup that aims to help businesses build, secure and deploy AI assistants has raised eyebrows from the big seeds. Sycamore On Monday they announced a $65 million seed round led by Coatue and Lightspeed, with a long list of angels including OpenAI chief scientist Bob McGrew, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, and others.

A number of factors turned the heads of investors and enticed them to take a big stake right out of the gate. First, unlike many startups in this space, Sycamore is not led by a 19-year-old Y Combinator grad – its founder brings many years: Sri Viswanath, a former Coatue salesperson. He left his full-time VC job that fall to start Sycamore, where he is CEO.

“I’ve spent over 20 years building global enterprise platforms at Sun Microsystems, VMware, Groupon, and as CTO of Atlassian, where I led cloud transformation and scaled engineering to 7,000+,” Viswanath told TechCrunch. “The circle came together because of a long-standing relationship.”

Second, they are not creating a single-purpose product that solves one narrow problem but are trying to create an entire orchestration group that manages everything from scripting to back-end, access where it matters.

“A lot of tools take existing workflows and layer assistants on top,” he said, adding that his basic product “starts with the problem itself and then designs and builds the right solution from scratch, whether it involves agents, backend systems, frontends, or data integration,” he said.

He said Sycamore has already started attracting big customers but declined to name them.

However, even with the vote of confidence of the most seed, Sycamore is entering a field full of competition on all sides. There are countless small startups working on this, ranging from small (eg Maize AI), for startups that are raising large rounds, such as Isara backed by OpenAI, which raised $94 million, Wall Street Journal report last week. (This one is run by 23-year-old researchers.)

Then there are those in growth mode as well Irelandwhich announced a $100 million raise in September, and Port, which announced a $100 million round in December. Top model makers also want to have a business platform, among them OpenAI with Frontier and Anthropic and its growing Cowork. If that’s not enough, the big AI cloud providers like Microsoft Azure with Foundry, and AWS with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore also want it.

So this is a big hill to climb in a market that is yet to happen but is highly anticipated. Other VC firms that participated in Sycamore’s raising include Abstract Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, 8VC, Fellows Fund, and E14 Fund. Other notable angels include Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest; Rubrik and Wisdom AI co-founder Soham Majumdar; and Zapier and Ndea co-founder Mike Knoop.