OpenAI Chairman’s Sierra to Raise $350 Million: Report

Sierra, a company that develops AI agents for enterprise customer service, is close to finalising a deal to raise $350 million in funding at a valuation of $10 billion, Axios reported citing sources familiar with the matter. 

The report added that the funding will be led by Greenoaks Capital, and Sierra is on track to exceed $100 million in enterprise annual recurring revenue (ARR). 

The company’s founders include Bret Taylor, who serves as the chairman of OpenAI, and Clay Bavor, who spent over 18 years at Google, leading Google Labs and Google Workspace. 

Sierra’s Agent OS is a platform for building, deploying and managing AI agents for customer service. It enables enterprises to tailor agents with brand guidelines, provide reliable omnichannel support, and integrate skills, guardrails and performance tools for measurable impact.

“Sierra agents, for instance, can look up a customer’s order history in an order management system, process a return, search a channel lineup, pull diagnostic information for a customer’s device to help troubleshoot, change a subscription plan, and more,” said the company in a blog post.

It uses LLMs from leading model providers such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta to provide services. In June, Sierra said that 15% of the customers the company serves have a revenue of over $10 billion a year, and 50% have a revenue of over $1 billion a year. 

The company previously raised $175 million at a $4.5 billion valuation last October. According to Crunchbase, the company has raised a total of $285 million in funding. 

Over the past few months, the use of AI and related tools and products for customer support has increased. Recently, Salesforce, the cloud-based company that offers apps and services for sales and customer support, has deployed AI agents for a large portion of its customer support tasks, resulting in a reduction of the company’s support staff from 9,000 to 5,000 people. 

Speaking on a recent podcast, Marc Benioff, the CEO, said Salesforce acted as “customer zero” for the tool, which has already handled about 1.5 million customer conversations. Human support agents conducted roughly the same number of interactions over the same period.