Serval is two years old, sells to the IT help desk, and investors just valued it at $3 billion. The enterprise service management startup announced Thursday that it has raised $150 million in a Series C led by Sequoia Capital Operations — its third round in just over a year — after its valuation tripled from the $1 billion it fetched at last December's Series B.
The pitch is simple enough that it barely needs explaining: employees describe a workflow in plain language, AI agents write the automation, and the system resolves incoming requests as they arrive. What legacy ITSM products mostly do, Serval argues, is track tickets. What Serval does is close them.
What changed since last year is scope. Serval started on the IT help desk, but its customers have been dragging the platform into HR, finance, and legal on their own — and the new money follows that pull. Much of it goes to Catalyst, an agent Serval launched in August that scans support tickets for repetitive tasks and drafts automations an administrator reviews before anything goes live. Co-founder and CTO Alex McLeod framed it as giving non-engineers "a powerful code generation tool" for their least fulfilling work.
The rest of the round funds ProServal, a professional services unit that plans to put more than 100 automation engineers on-site at large customers to map how work moves between teams and build automations in days. It's a slightly funny detail: a company whose product eliminates manual work is about to hire 500 people. But that hiring plan — offices in New York, London, and Austin, headcount up 10x in a year — is the bet that enterprise automation sells through handshakes, not downloads.
Then there's the claim investors clearly priced in: some large customers are ripping ServiceNow out entirely. One automaker completed a full switch in 45 days, according to Serval — covering ITSM, the configuration management database, and hardware and software asset tracking. Two Fortune 20 companies signed on in recent months to deploy automations org-wide, joining a customer list that includes Fox, WPP, and Live Nation. Revenue figures stay private, though the company says ARR has doubled every quarter since December and most customers go live within 30 days.
That's the pattern worth watching. Yesterday, ServiceNow lost 19% of its value in a day partly because Wall Street suspects it might be an AI casualty. Today, a two-year-old startup is valued at $3 billion on the premise that ServiceNow's customers will pay to leave. One of those readings is wrong — and Sequoia, back for its third Serval check alongside Conviction, Headline, and returning investors including General Catalyst and Elad Gil, just voted loudly on which one.
The honest version of McLeod's quote may be the best summary of the whole round: "Nobody has 10 years of experience doing this, because two years ago the tools didn't exist." Serval is now worth $3 billion on expertise that, by its own CEO's admission, is about two years old.
— via SiliconANGLE