It's been just about one year since Bret Taylor stepped down as co-CEO of Salesforce and teased an upcoming AI project. Now we know what he's been cooking up.
Taylor officially announced his new startup, called Sierra Technologies, on Tuesday which he co-founded with former Google executive Clay Bavor in early 2023.
A press release described Sierra as an "AI agent" for businesses that will automate interactions with customers in a conversational way, a hallmark of generative artificial intelligence software popularized by OpenAI over the past couple of years.
"I’m so excited to announce Clay Bavor and my new company, Sierra," Taylor posted on LinkedIn. "With Sierra, your company can build its own AI agent — an important new category of software that will enable your company to build delightful, AI-powered conversational customer experiences for everything from support to retail."
Taylor touted WeightWatchers, SiriusXM, Sonos and OluKai as early customers of Sierra that helped test it out.
Based in San Francisco, Taylor and Bavor have already scooped up $110 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and other investors, according to Fortune.
That puts Sierra in the running for being among the top funded generative AI companies in the Bay Area.
That sizable war chest is meant to help Sierra "always be on offense" amid a competitive landscape for AI chatbots, Sequoia Capital partner Ravi Gupta told Fortune.
Sierra's competitors include Salesforce which has been building out its own AI-powered suite of business software.
"It's squarely about one thing: the AI opportunity," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said during Dreamforce last year, and "it's gonna radically change the landscape."
Microsoft's OpenAI-powered assistant, which it calls Copilot, had a surge of new downloads on Monday after the tech giant bought a 60-second commercial that aired on Sunday during the Super Bowl, NBC News reported.
Taylor is also the chair of OpenAI's board, a role he gained in November amid the former board's failed attempt to oust CEO Sam Altman. He also chaired Twitter's board during its tumultuous take over by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
The market for generative AI software products could grow to $1.3 billion by 2032, according to a report from Bloomberg Intelligence, and incumbent tech giants that are likely to benefit from that growth include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Nvidia.
