Bret Taylor’s Sierra raises $350M at a $10B valuation
Investors are clearly bullish about former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor’s AI agent startup Sierra.
Sierra, which helps enterprises build customer service AI agents, announced it raised a $350 million funding round on Thursday. The round, led by earlier investor Greenoaks Capital, values the startup at $10 billion, according to a company blog post that confirmed an earlier report from Axios on Wednesday.
Sierra was founded in early 2024 by Taylor and longtime Google alum Clay Bavor. The company claims to have landed hundreds of customers, including SoFi, Ramp, and Brex, among others, in its 18 months of operation.
Sierra has now raised $635 million altogether, including $110 million that closed in February of last year led by Sequoia and Benchmark, and a $175 million round that closed in October of last year led by Greenoaks.
Others of its investors include ICONIQ and Thrive Capital.
As TechCrunch has previously reported, Taylor and Bavor have a long history in customer service tech. Taylor spent nearly a decade at Salesforce and years ago founded Quip, which Salesforce bought for $750 million in the summer of 2016. Bavor managed Gmail and Google Drive at Google, among other consumer-facing products.
Taylor met Bavor while at Google, where he worked before serving as Facebook’s CTO for several years. At Google, Taylor is widely credited with helping to launch Google Maps. Years later, he’d oversee the Twitter board throughout Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media site.
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Earlier this week, in fact, Taylor announced that Sierra is launching its second year of its so-called APX program, a rotational opportunity for recent technical graduates that directly mirrors the Google program that launched both Taylor’s and co-founder Clay Bavor’s careers two decades ago.
The hiring announcement stands out in what has become an increasingly tough job market, particularly as companies assess the power of AI technologies like those Sierra is selling and their potential impact on workforce needs.
The program targets computer science graduates and says it offers experience in both agent engineering and product management. Taylor described the roles as providing what he calls “an irresponsible amount of responsibility” — similar to the freedom to build and launch products that he and Bavor had at Google — with new graduates expected to work on multiple product launches during their first year.
Becca is a senior writer at TechCrunch that covers venture capital trends and startups. She previously covered the same beat for Forbes and the Venture Capital Journal.
You can contact or verify outreach from Becca by emailing rebecca.szkutak@techcrunch.com.
