Serval, a San Francisco startup that sells AI agents for IT and employee support, said on Oct. 29 that it has raised a $150 million Series C led by Sequoia at a $3 billion valuation. The company says its total funding is now $277 million.
Existing investors Elad Gil, Evantic, First Round, General Catalyst and Redpoint returned, according to Serval’s announcement on BusinessWire. Conviction and Headline joined as new investors.
It’s the company’s third round in 12 months. Sequoia also led Serval’s $75 million Series B in December 2025, which valued it at $1 billion, Fortune’s Nick Lichtenberg reported. The new price is three times that.
Serval doesn’t hide who it’s chasing.
CEO and co-founder Jake Stauch told Fortune that his company picked ServiceNow, the largest seller of IT service management software, as its target on purpose. “It was just a fight that we decided to pick,” he said. Fortune reported that Serval’s ads name ServiceNow directly and that Stauch called the similar-sounding names a coincidence.
IT service management is the software companies use to log and resolve employee requests, such as a new laptop, a password reset or access to an app. Stauch’s argument, as Fortune described it, is that ServiceNow is at heart a workflow automation company built on drag-and-drop tools and custom setup, and that AI-written code makes that work cheap to replace.
What Serval sells
Serval’s agents build the automations behind employee support and then resolve requests with them, the company says. It started with IT tasks such as managing staff access and troubleshooting, and The Next Web reported that customers now also use it in HR, finance, security and legal teams. Serval names Fox, Live Nation, Notion, Ramp and Lucid Motors as customers.
Much of the new money goes to an automation agent called Catalyst, which Serval says lets employees with no engineering background build workflows. Stauch told Reuters that the product “is a true alternative replacement for platforms like ServiceNow,” according to The Next Web’s account of that interview.
The company is also starting a professional services arm called ProServal. Serval says it will place more than 100 automation engineers inside large organizations to rebuild their processes around AI. “Nobody has ten years of experience doing this, because two years ago the tools didn’t exist,” Stauch said in the announcement.
Serval plans to hire 500 people in the next 12 months, according to Fenwick, the law firm that represented it in the deal. The Next Web reported that it’s opening offices in New York, London and Austin.
The headcount is moving fast already. Fortune reported that Serval had about 20 employees in January and about 200 now, and that Stauch expects at least 700 by the end of 2027. Stauch and his co-founder, chief technology officer Alex McLeod, met at the security-camera company Verkada.
Sequoia partner Anas Biad gave Fortune his own forecast. “From the data we’ve seen, Serval is on a trajectory to be the fastest-growing top-down Enterprise system-of-record company in history,” he said. Serval hasn’t published revenue figures, and that claim hasn’t been independently checked.
Stauch called the back-to-back raises “opportunistic” and told Fortune the company has “years and years of runway in the bank.”
Source: BusinessWire, Serval, “Serval Raises $150M Series C at $3B Valuation Led by Sequoia”
Additional sources: Fortune, Nick Lichtenberg, “'It was just a fight that we decided to pick': Serval raises $150 million at a $3 billion valuation to take on ServiceNow”; The Next Web, “Serval raises $150m at $3bn valuation to replace ServiceNow with AI agents”; Fenwick, “Fenwick Represents Serval in $150M Series C Funding”
