Sierra, the AI startup co-founded by OpenAI Chairman Brett Taylor, has raised $175 million in a funding round that values the startup at $4.5 billion.
Founded by Taylor and longtime Google executive Clay Bavor, Sierra focuses on selling AI-powered customer service chatbots to brands like WeightWatchers and Sirius XM. There is also an “Agent” component. The platform connects to other enterprise systems and performs tasks on behalf of customers without human involvement.
It's true that there is a lot of competition in the chatbot field. But Sierra claims its technology is not susceptible to hallucinations, fabricated facts that AI models sometimes spit out.
Sierra also allows customers to use “constellations” of generative AI models such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta to customize the personality of their AI to match their corporate brand to complete tasks and improve accuracy. so you can check it.
Taylor and Bavor have a long history in the customer service technology field. Taylor worked at Salesforce for nearly a decade and founded Quip a few years ago. Quip was acquired by Salesforce in summer 2016 for $750 million. Mr. Bavor previously worked at Google managing consumer products such as Gmail and Google Drive.
Mr. Taylor met Mr. Baber while at Google, where he worked before serving as Facebook's CTO for several years. At Google, Taylor is widely credited with helping launch Google Maps. Years later, he would oversee the Twitter committee during Elon Musk's takeover of the social media site.
Investors in Sierra's latest round included ICONIQ and Thrive Capital. Greenoaks Capital led the round, bringing Sierra's total funding to $285 million, according to Crunchbase.
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