Sierra AI raises $175M, putting serious pressure on existing Conversational AI vendors
I've been watching Sierra AI now and again to see how things have been going and goodness me, it's getting exciting. The story for me begins with this TechCrunch piece ("No one seemed to see Bret Taylor stepping away from Salesforce").
Then it was TechCrunch again that caught my attention when they highlighted that Bret Taylor had gone on to team up with Clay Bavor (of Google Labs) to create Sierra AI... and raise a whopping $110M in the process. It was only about 8 months ago when Bret posted on LinkedIn announcing Sierra.
Well, they just got another $175M in funding, resulting in a $4.5 billion valuation (Reuters). Why? I'll come to that.
Through writing this publication I get to speak to quite a lot of executives working in and around the Conversational AI space – and I've been fortunate to advise a few now and again.
I always like to use the phrase 'run fast', not least when I'm in a permanent role or when I'm advising other executives. Why? Because of players like Sierra.
You might be riding high on a wave of excitement – but there's always another player around the corner ready to eat your lunch, as the phrase goes.
Ok, back to Sierra AI.
They are very well-placed to challenge the existing players in the market – just going by the pedigree of the two founders. The company's About page does a nice job of summarising things, thus:
Bret Taylor
Bret is Co-Founder of Sierra. Most recently, he served as Co-CEO of Salesforce. Prior to Salesforce, Bret founded Quip and was CTO of Facebook. He started his career at Google, where he co-created Google Maps. Bret serves on the board of OpenAI.
And
Clay Bavor
Clay is Co-Founder of Sierra. Previously, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace.
That, dear reader, is pedigree.
Oh, and they know Salesforce very, very well.
"In the age of conversational AI, every company needs an agent"
That's the position of Sierra and it's likely being very, very well received.
Sierra refers to their platform as Agent OS - and they talk about offering developers the ability to use an Agent Software Developers Kit (Agent SDK) to easily develop and deploy as needed.
This is quite distinct from the way in which so many other vendors are approaching and addressing the marketplace.
The company has just employed a Developer Marketing Lead (Matt Firestone). I don't know many Conversational AI vendors who are actively engaging developers – but this is a seriously important aspect of market outreach that I think it's fair to say is generally overlooked by the marketplace.
Uh oh, Say More?
As you know, dear reader, financial services is a key area of interest for me so I'm often looking at Conversational AI from that viewpoint, simply because I'm doing so much advisory work in the industry. If you're selling shoes, I'm less concerned about the wording the 'Agent' or chatbot is using. If you're making up policy on the fly for regulated entities such as banks, that's deeply problematic.
So I would have serious questions to ask the Sierra team about how they handle these aspects. For example: Every single one of my banking clients has no interest, whatsoever, in any 'reduction' in hallucinations. Let's not mix words: There can be no hallucinations when you're talking to banking customers. I would expect that the Sierra team have some good, compelling answers for this issue though – it looks like they've done a lot of work on the filtering/monitoring/injection aspects, for example.
Customers
As you might expect, the company already has a long list of customers and some excellent, detailed case studies on their website. For example:
- Read how the mattress-in-a-box leader Casper is using Sierra's Agents to deliver 74% resolution rates and 20% increase in CSAT scores.
- Read how Sonos is accelerating time to music by implementing Sierra's Agents across the whole setup process.
- Or read how WeightWatchers are achieving 70% resolution rate with Sierra's Agents with a CSAT score of 4.6 (out of 5, I presume).
So if Sierra wasn't on your radar, dear reader, put it on there.
You can find Bret Taylor, Co-Founder of Sierra on LinkedIn here:
And Clay Bavor is on LinkedIn here:
If you're looking for a contact beyond Bret and Clay, I see 128 'associated' people on LinkedIn mentioning Sierra but I don't immediately see anyone you might reach out to for European market discussions yet.
I would suggest that your first port of call is to reach out to Brianna Elefant:
Brianna Elefant
Or fill in the company's Learn More form.
Good luck Team Sierra and congratulations on the raise.
