Bret Taylor’s AI startup Sierra raises funding at $4.5 billion valuation

cnbc.com:

Artificial intelligence startup Sierra, co-founded by ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, is more than quadrupling its valuation to $4.5 billion in a fresh funding round.

The San Francisco-based company, which was valued at $1 billion in January, raised $175 million in a funding round led by Greenoaks Capital. The Information reported earlier this month that Sierra was in the midst of raising capital.

Taylor is chairman of OpenAI's board and previously ran Salesforce, alongside Marc Benioff. He was also chairman of Twitter when Elon Musk was negotiating to buy the social media company. Taylor is a longtime entrepreneur, widely credited with helping to create Google Maps. At Google, he met his Sierra co-founder Clay Bavor, who spent nearly two decades at the tech giant, leading virtual reality efforts and Google Labs.

Sierra is focused on helping enterprises like home security company ADT, Sonos, Weight Watchers and Casper personalize and implement AI agents for customer service. Taylor and Bavor unveiled the startup earlier this year.

«We think every company in the world, whether it's a technology company or a 150-year-old company like ADT, can benefit from AI, and the technology is ready right now,» Taylor told CNBC in an interview. «We want to enable Sierra to address that market, and that means expanding internationally and to other industries.» 

ICONIQ and Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital contributed to the new funding round.

Taylor describes Sierra as «conversational AI,» and bristles at the word «chatbot,» even banning the phrase in the company's downtown San Francisco office. Sierra is looking to create a more conversational style of interaction, Taylor said. He pointed to the ease of OpenAI's ChatGPT and compared