Sierra raises $950M as competition for AI startups heats up

Bret Taylor’s AI startup Sierra is raising $950 million in funding led by Tiger Global and GV, the company. he announced on Mondaypushing its value after more than $ 15 billion. The upgrade gives Sierra more than $1 billion to work with — capital that the company says it will use to become the “global standard” for AI customer experiences.

Like many AI companies, Sierra has, wisely, taken steps to grow in a crowded market. The company is said to have started with just four partners a few years ago. Today it claims to have more than 40% of the Fortune 50 as clients, and claims that the agents working on its platform are handling multi-billion dollar transactions, from mortgage payments to insurance claims processing, managing returns, and promoting non-profit fundraising campaigns.

Indeed, the financial news follows the increase in revenue shared by Sierra, which said it hit $100 million for the year in late November, then published another post in early February, saying it hit $150 million in ARR.

This flow shows the urgency businesses feel when deploying AI and the value that comes with it. Taylor, who is also the chairman of OpenAI and a former Co-CEO of Salesforce, has said that the best results of agent AI are lower costs and more revenue for customers, but before those returns, the upside can be expensive.

This real-life scenario came to light during a discussion at one of TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC events last week. Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga put it plainly in an interview with this editor, saying that Uber “blew our (AI) budget” as soon as it opened the door to AI tools late last year. He said the company is starting to see tangible results.

Among the nearly 8,000 engineers and technical staff, about 10% of all the code generated at the company is currently automated, he said, adding that “10% at our level is huge.” As a proof-of-concept, Uber commissioned one team to build and book new hotels using the same operating system. A project that normally takes a year was done in six months, he said.

Sierra is also expanding its platform’s capabilities beyond customer-facing agents. In April, the company founded Ghostwriteran “agent as a service” tool designed to build other agents. Users describe what they need in natural language, and Ghostwriter automatically generates and dispatches an agent to handle it.

For Taylor, the tool underscores a broader perspective he presented at the HumanX conference in San Francisco last month. Most business software tools, he argued, are rarely used. Employees enter Workday when they board and sign up, and that’s it. The future of Sierra and the bettors is one where people don’t have to run complex systems at all.