Sierrathe AI startup co-founded by OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor educated $175 million in a funding round that values the startup at $4.5 billion.
Launched by Taylor and longtime Google executive Clay Bavor, Sierra focuses on selling AI-powered customer support chatbots to brands like WeightWatchers and Sirius XM. There can be an “agent” component. The platform connects to other enterprise systems to perform tasks on behalf of the shopper without the necessity for humans to be involved.
There is actually no lack of competition within the chatbot space. But Sierra claims its technology is less at risk of hallucinations, the made-up facts that AI models occasionally spew.
Sierra also allows customers to customize the personality of its AI to match their company brand, using a “constellation” of generative AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, amongst others, to finish tasks and check for accuracy.
Taylor and Bavor have a protracted history in customer support engineering. Taylor spent nearly a decade at Salesforce and years ago founded Quip, which Salesforce bought in the summertime of 2016 for $750 million. At Google, Bavor managed Gmail and Google Drive, amongst other consumer-focused products.
Taylor met Bavor at Google, where he worked before serving as Facebook's CTO for several years. At Google, Taylor is widely credited with helping launch Google Maps. Years later, he led Twitter's board during Elon Musk's acquisition of the social media site.
Investors in Sierra's most up-to-date round included ICONIQ and Thrive Capital. Greenoaks Capital led the round, bringing Sierra's total raised to $285 million. per Crunchbase.
