Sierra, a conversational AI company founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, announced it raised $175 million in funding led by Greenoaks Capital. ICONIQ and Thrive Capital contributed to this new funding round. This funding round valued Sierra at $4.5 billion, more than quadrupling its $1 billion valuation in January.
Taylor is chairman of the board at OpenAI, and he was also chairman of Twitter during the time Elon Musk was in negotiations to buy the company. Taylor is also known for overseeing the creation of Google Maps.
While working at Google, Taylor met with Sierra co-founder Clay Bavor. Between 2021 and 2023, Bavor served as the VP of Labs at Google, and he also started and led Google’s AR/VR efforts and several related projects, such as Project Starline and Google Lens. Sierra works with companies like ADT, Sonos, Casper, and Weight Watchers to implement AI agent technologies for customer services.
Sierra enables each client to customize the agents’ personality to their corporate brands. Brands can use different accents, tones, emoji, etc.
What makes Sierra different from other AI companies is that it emphasizes on the reduction of hallucinations. Hallucinations are issues where large language models (LLMs) generate false details.
This funding round comes on the heels of other notable investments in the space. For example, OpenAI recently raised $6.6 billion at a $157 billion valuation. And earlier this year, Perplexity raised $73.6 million at a reported $520 million valuation.
