Yet another startup aimed at helping companies build, secure, and tune their AI agents has raised a major seed round with alarm bells ringing. Sycamore announced a $65 million seed on Monday led by Coatue and Lightspeed and includes a long list of angels including former OpenAI chief scientist Bob McGrew, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, and more.
Several things resonated with investors and drew them to participate in such a large round in the first place. First, unlike many startups in this space, Sycamore is not led by a 19-year-old Y Combinator graduate. Its founder is Sri Viswanath, a former Kotu investor with decades of experience. He left his full-time VC job in the fall to start Sycamore, of which he is CEO.
“I spent more than 20 years building world-class enterprise platforms at Sun Microsystems, VMware, and Groupon, and as CTO at Atlassian, leading cloud transformation and growing the engineering organization to over 7,000 people,” Viswanath tells TechCrunch. “This round was made possible through a long-standing relationship.”
Second, he's not building a single-purpose product that solves one narrow problem, but rather an entire agent orchestration layer that handles everything from the coding to the backend infrastructure and intervenes where needed.
“Most tools take existing workflows and layer agents on top,” he said, adding that his startup's products “start with the problem itself and design and build the right solution from the ground up, including agents, backend systems, frontends, and data integration.”
He said Sycamore has already attracted attention from some large enterprise customers, but declined to name names.
But despite a vote of confidence from a large seed round, Sycamore is entering a field that's competitive in all directions. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that countless small startups are working on this, from the very small (like Maisa AI) to emerging startups that are raising even larger rounds like OpenAI-backed Isara. (This laboratory is run by two 23-year-old researchers.)
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Others are in growth mode, like Aeria, which announced a $100 million raise in September, and Port, which announced a $100 million raise in December. Top model makers also want to own enterprise agent platforms, including OpenAI with Frontier and Anthropic with the ever-expanding Cowork. If that's not enough, major AI cloud providers like Microsoft Azure with Foundry and AWS with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore want it too.
So this is a big mountain to climb in a huge market that is not yet realized but is widely expected. Other VC firms that participated in Sycamore's funding include Abstract Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, 8VC, Fellows Fund, and E14 Fund. Other notable angels include Frederic Kerest, co-founder of Okta. Soham Majumdar, co-founder of Rubrik and Wisdom AI. Mike Knoop, co-founder of Zapier and Ndea.