Sierra, a 21-month-old San Francisco-based startup building customer service AI agents for enterprises, announced Friday that it has reached $100 million in annual revenue run rate (ARR). The company's rapid growth suggests that companies across industries are adopting AI agents.
The speed of the startup's growth surprised even its veteran co-founders, former Salesforce co-CEO Brett Taylor and longtime Google employee Clay Baber, who wrote in a blog post, “This is much faster than we expected.”
Sierra's customers include technology companies such as Deliveroo, Discord, Ramp, Rivian, SoFi, and Tubi, as well as established companies outside of the technology space such as ADT, Bissell, Vans, Cigna, and SiriusXM.
Taylor and Baber said they expected tech companies to be comfortable experimenting with AI customer service agents, but were surprised to see older companies becoming Sierra customers.
The company says it can build AI agents that can handle tasks such as authenticating patients for healthcare providers, processing returns, ordering alternative credit cards, and helping customers apply for mortgages, essentially automating customer service tasks that previously required human agents.
Although Sierra faces competition from startups such as Decagon and Intercom, the company claims to be the leader in the AI customer service category.
Sierra was last valued at $10 billion when it raised $350 million in a round led by GreenOaks Capital in September. Other investors in the company include Sequoia, Benchmark, ICONIQ, and Thrive Capital.
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Based on $100 million in ARR, Sierra is currently valued at a 100x earnings multiple, a very high valuation despite exceptionally fast growth.
The startup uses an outcome-based pricing model, charging customers for work completed rather than charging a flat subscription fee.
Taylor and Bavor met in 2005 at Google, where Taylor hired Bavor as an associate product manager.
Taylor, a Stanford University computer science graduate, co-created Google Maps before founding FriendFeed, which was acquired by Facebook. He was CTO at Facebook, where he helped create the iconic “Like” button. He later founded Quip, a Google Docs competitor that Salesforce acquired for $750 million in 2016.
Taylor then served as co-CEO of Salesforce alongside Marc Benioff for more than a year. After Taylor left Salesforce in 2023, Bavor, who spent 18 years at Google working on key products like Gmail and Google Drive, invited him to lunch, where they decided to launch Sierra.