Thira announced that it raised $21 million in seed funding led by Madrona, with participation from FUSE and a group of global advisors and CIOs.
The Bellevue, Washington-based company is building a secure, self-learning AI system of execution for enterprise back-office operations. Thira is initially focused on enterprise IT processes and aims to help organizations execute complex operational workflows across the systems they already use.
Thira was founded by Apptio co-founders Sunny Gupta and Kurt Shintaffer, who are reuniting as part of the company’s founding team. The broader founding and early team includes Mudit Goel, former SVP of Engineering at Atlassian; Grant Neuman, former AI Engineer at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure; Tarek Madkour, former Director of Product Management at Databricks; and Shashwat Srivastav, former founder and lead AI engineer at AIVOT.
Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain will join Thira’s board of directors. McIlwain previously partnered with Gupta at both iConclude and Apptio. FUSE’s Kellan Carter will join Thira as a board observer.
Thira is designed to operate within existing enterprise systems while securely executing complex operational processes. Its platform combines self-learning agents, enterprise-grade security and governance, system connectivity, and an AI execution system powered by an enterprise knowledge graph.
The company said its goal is to create a “back-office that runs itself,” beginning with IT workflows that often require coordination across multiple tools, systems, and teams. Rather than simply providing insights, Thira is being built to take action on complex processes with visibility and control.
Gupta and Shintaffer previously helped define the FinOps and Technology Business Management category through Apptio, which is now part of IBM. Under Apptio, they also founded the TBM Council, which grew to more than 10,000 CIOs and senior IT leaders.
The founders said decades of work with CIOs and enterprise technology leaders showed a need for trusted AI-native systems that can execute workflows across disparate systems, not just analyze them. Ten enterprise organizations are currently helping shape Thira as design partners ahead of a broader launch planned for this fall.
Thira said global IT spending exceeds $6.3 trillion annually, with a significant portion tied to manual and repetitive operational work. The company’s mission is to return $1 trillion of enterprise spending for reinvestment in innovation by changing how enterprise processes are executed.
The company will use the seed funding to expand its engineering team and deepen collaboration with design partners. Thira is positioning itself as an agentic execution platform for enterprises that need automation with security, governance, and operational accountability.
KEY QUOTES:
“CIOs are at the forefront of bringing AI innovation to the enterprises and are realizing that the real opportunity is executing complex processes that touch disparate systems with enterprise level controls. I spent a decade and a half proving we could be trusted with visibility into enterprise technology spend. Now we’re building Thira to act on it and change the outcomes for every enterprise back-office through agentic execution.”
Sunny Gupta, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Thira
“AI systems of execution are core to the future enterprise, and the office of the CIO requires an AI-native approach to building such a transformative system. Sunny, Kurt and the Thira team have earned the trust of CIOs over two decades by delivering on IT automation and the system of record for technology spend. Now, they have assembled the perfect blend of proven enterprise product builders and AI-native innovators to deliver durable solutions that will once again help CIOs and their teams be heroes in their organizations. This is my third time starting and building a company with Sunny and it is by far the largest opportunity we have pursued together.”
Matt McIlwain, Managing Director at Madrona
