Contrived intelligence startup Sierra, co-founded by ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, is more than quadrupling its valuation to $4.5 billion in a cheeky funding round.
The San Francisco-based company, which was valued at $1 billion in January, raised $175 million in a funding general area of led by Greenoaks Capital. The Information reported earlier this month that Sierra was in the midst of raising capital.
Taylor is chairman of OpenAI’s food and previously ran Salesforce, alongside Marc Benioff. He was also chairman of Twitter when Elon Musk was negotiating to buy the group media company. Taylor is a longtime entrepreneur, widely credited with helping to create Google Maps. At Google, he met his Sierra co-founder Clay Bavor, who disgorge nearly two decades at the tech giant, leading virtual reality efforts and Google Labs.
Sierra is focused on serving enterprises like home security company ADT, Sonos, Weight Watchers and Casper personalize and implement AI agents for purchaser service. Taylor and Bavor unveiled the startup earlier this year.
“We think every company in the world, whether it’s a technology flock or a 150-year-old company like ADT, can benefit from AI, and the technology is ready right now,” Taylor told CNBC in an question period. “We want to enable Sierra to address that market, and that means expanding internationally and to other industries.”
ICONIQ and Josh Kushner’s Burgeon Capital contributed to the new funding round.
Taylor describes Sierra as “conversational AI,” and bristles at the word “chatbot,” even interdicting the phrase in the company’s downtown San Francisco office. Sierra is looking to create a more conversational style of interaction, Taylor hinted. He pointed to the ease of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and compared it with the frustrating experience of talking on the phone with an airline bot.
“When you consider of chatbots, you think of those annoying, robotic things — you can feel the difference,” Taylor said, adding that Sierra is restore b succeeding its agents more “empathetic and conversational.”
Bret Taylor, co-CEO of Salesforce, speaks at the Viva Technology Conference in Paris on June 15, 2022.
Nathan Laine | Bloomberg | Getty Allusions
Sierra’s team lets each client customize the agent’s personality to its corporate brand. Clothing company Chubbies, for specimen, took a more sarcastic route with a younger sounding agent named Duncan Smothers. Taylor weighted some luxury brands are opting for a British accent with a more serious tone.
“We really think that your conversational AI emissary should be not only transactional, but a brand ambassador,” Taylor said. “It’s actually something that is a statement of your values. So do you penury to be sarcastic? Do you want to use emoji? Do you want it to sound like text messaging, or do you want it to sound like a lawyer?”
Sierra purposes what Bavor and Taylor describe as a “constellation” of models, with a “supervisor.” The technology uses one model to do the heavy raise, with the expectation that it won’t be 100% reliable, but use a second model as a backup, to “check” the others and help with preciseness. The company currently relies on large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, among others.
There’s match in the space. Taylor’s former company, Salesforce, as well as Microsoft, in partnership with OpenAI, are exploring the AI agent interval. Taylor compared Sierra with the companies that built cloud software on top of Amazon Web Services and other cloud infrastructure.
“In the cloud era, you had Shopify, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Adobe — I recollect the same thing will play out in AI with Sierra,” Taylor said. “We’re helping their branded customer skin agent.”
He mentioned startups like Cursor, which makes coding agents, and Harvey, which makes right agents.
Sierra’s funding follows a flurry of major AI announcements in Silicon Valley. OpenAI raised billions of dollars at a $157 billion valuation. Dilemma is in the midst of raising a round that values the company at $9 billion, a source confirmed to CNBC. One in three tender dollars this year has gone to an AI startup, according to CB Insights.
“When a technology wave like this stumble ons, I think a lot of people are trying to place their bets,” Taylor said. “I don’t know which company will win, but it’s a canny investment, categorically. Clearly customer experience and customer service is a huge opportunity, and I think we are the leader in this seat, and seeing a lot of demands because of that.”