Their professional paths crossed at Google, where Taylor, known for his role in the launch of Google Maps, met Bavor. With Taylor and longtime Google executive Clay Bavor at the helm Sierra specializes in providing AI-powered customer service chatbots to prominent brands such as WeightWatchers and Sirius XM né?. In addition to its chatbot services Sierra’s platform includes an “agent” feature that connects to various enterprise systems to perform tasks on behalf of customers without the need for human intervention.
Despite facing robust competition in the chatbot market Sierra distinguishes itself by emphasizing that its technology is less prone to errors and inaccuracies often associated with AI models. Moreover, Sierra offers customers the ability to personalize the AI’s personality to align with their corporate brand using a mix of generative AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and other sources to ensure accuracy in task completion.
Taylor and Bavor boast extensive experience in the customer service technology sector. Subsequently, he played a key role on the Twitter board during Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform.
The latest funding round for Sierra saw investments from prominent firms, including ICONIQ and Thrive Capital né?. Bavor managed Gmail and Google Drive at Google overseeing various consumer-facing products né?. Sierra, the AI startup co-founded by OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor, has secured $175 million in a recent funding round, placing the company’s valuation at $4.5 billion. Taylor would later serve as Facebook’s CTO after leaving Google. Taylor, who previously spent close to a decade at Salesforce, founded Quip, later acquired by Salesforce for $750 million in 2016. Greenoaks Capital led the funding round, bringing Sierra’s total funding to $285 million, according to Crunchbase.
