Updated with confirmation:

Sierra Technologies Inc., an artificial intelligence startup with high-profile founders, is raising capital at a $10 billion valuation, the company confirmed Thursday.

Sierra said it’s raising $350 million in the round. Greenoaks Capital is expected to lead the investment. The venture capital firm led a $175 million round for Sierra last year at a $4.5 billion valuation.

Sierra was launched in 2023 by Bret Taylor (pictured, left) and Clay Bavor (right). Taylor is a onetime co-chief executive of Salesforce Inc. who currently serves as OpenAI’s board chair. Bavor is a former Google LLC executive who led the search giant’s Google Labs product development group.

Sierra provides a software toolkit that companies can use to create AI agents. The Agent SDK, as it’s called, includes pre-packaged building blocks that remove the need for developers to write everything from scratch. One of the toolkit’s components makes it easier to equip agents with web search features. The others ease tasks such as processing customer support requests.

According to Sierra, companies can also use Agent SDK to create guardrails for their agents. A bank, for example, might wish to ensure that a technical support agent always answers common financial questions the same way. Minimizing prompt response variations can help reduce the risk of hallucinations.

Sierra provides a second development tool, Agent Studio, that allows business users to customize agents without writing code. Marketers can embed their company’s logo into a chatbot’s welcome message. A support team, meanwhile, could improve a support agent’s troubleshooting skills by uploading knowledge base articles.

After a company completes the development of an AI agent, it can use Sierra’s software to test that everything works as expected. The platform makes it possible to simulate customer conversations and measure how well an agent responds. Once the agent is in production, Sierra can track the effectiveness with which it answers real-world requests.

The company also provides features for a number of adjacent use cases. According to Sierra, its platform can identify areas for improvement in an organization’s knowledge base. Additionally, it includes a dashboard that measures the business impact of AI agent projects.

In June, Sierra disclosed that its platform is used by hundreds of companies. More than half of those customers generate over $1 billion in annual sales. About 15% generate over $10 billion. Axios reported Thursday that Sierra’s “enterprise annual recurring revenue” is on track to top $100 million.

Photo: Sierra