The AI startup for customer service founded by Bret Taylor raised $175 million in funding.
Sierra, the AI startup co-founded by Bret Taylor, president of OpenAI, has raised $175 million in a funding round that puts the company's valuation at $4.5 billion.
Sierra, an artificial intelligence startup co-founded by Bret Taylor, president of OpenAI, has successfully raised $175 million in a funding round that values the company at $4.5 billion. This company, also established by Clay Bavor, a former Google executive, specializes in selling AI-powered customer service chatbots, serving brands such as WeightWatchers and Sirius XM.
Sierra's system includes an "agent" component that connects to other business systems to perform tasks on behalf of the customer, without human intervention. Despite the high competition in the chatbot space, Sierra stands out for its technology, which claims to be less prone to "hallucinations," meaning the generation of incorrect data that AI models sometimes produce. Additionally, it allows clients to customize the personality of their AI in line with their corporate brand, using a "constellation" of generative AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, among others, to complete tasks and verify accuracy.
Both Taylor and Bavor have extensive backgrounds in customer service technology. Taylor worked for nearly a decade at Salesforce and founded Quip, a company that Salesforce acquired for $750 million in 2016. Bavor, on the other hand, led products like Gmail and Google Drive at Google. Taylor and Bavor met at Google, where Taylor is known for contributing to the launch of Google Maps. After leaving Google, Taylor served as CTO of Facebook for several years and later oversaw the board of Twitter during Elon Musk's acquisition of the platform.
In this latest funding round, investors included ICONIQ and Thrive Capital, with Greenoaks Capital leading the investment, bringing Sierra's total funds raised to $285 million, according to Crunchbase data.
