Sierra raises $950 million at a valuation above $15 billion

Sierra, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup led by CEO Bret Taylor, has secured a $950 million funding round, the company announced on Monday. The round was led by Tiger Global and GV, pushing Sierra’s post-money valuation above $15 billion. This latest transaction gives the company more than $1 billion in total capital to work with as it aims to become the global standard for agentic AI—AI systems capable of performing tasks autonomously—in enterprise customer experiences. Taylor, who also serves as the chairman of OpenAI and was formerly the co-CEO of Salesforce, co-founded the company, which started with just four initial design partners.

The company has since expanded its customer base and revenue. Sierra’s growth metrics include:

• Customer adoption: The company now claims more than 40% of the Fortune 50—the top 50 companies in the Fortune 500—as customers.
• Revenue expansion: Sierra reported that its annual recurring revenue (ARR)—the predictable yearly revenue from subscriptions—grew from $100 million in late November to $150 million by early February.

This adoption reflects the urgency enterprises feel about deploying AI, though the initial ramp-up phase can carry significant costs. During a conversation at a StrictlyVC event last week, Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga noted that the company spent past its AI budget shortly after opening the door to agentic AI tools late last year. However, the deployment has also yielded measurable results across Uber’s staff of roughly 8,000 engineers and technical workers. Naga stated that about 10% of all code produced at Uber is now generated autonomously, adding that “10% at our scale is huge.” As a proof of concept, an Uber team built a hotel-booking integration using only agentic workflows in six months, a project that would normally take a year.

To expand beyond customer-facing applications, Sierra is broadening its platform capabilities. Last month at the HumanX conference in San Francisco, Taylor argued that many enterprise software tools are rarely used by employees. To address this, Sierra launched Ghostwriter last month, an “agent as a service” tool. Ghostwriter allows users to describe what they need in natural language, after which the tool autonomously creates and deploys a specialized agent to execute the task.

Why it matters

The funding round pushes Sierra’s post-money valuation above $15 billion, reflecting the urgency enterprises feel about deploying AI and the costs associated with the ramp-up phase.