Serval has raised 150 million dollars in a Series C funding round at a 3 billion dollar valuation, tripling its value since December, as large companies replace legacy enterprise software with its artificial intelligence agents. The round, led by Sequoia, is Serval’s third funding round in 12 months and brings its total raised to 277 million dollars. The San Francisco company says the new capital will support its Catalyst automation product, a modern system of record, and deeper work with customers undergoing artificial intelligence transformations.
What Serval builds
Employees in information technology, security, human resources, finance and legal departments use it to build and run code-based workflows without engineering experience. According to the company, its agents convert business requirements into deterministic tools that run under strict enterprise controls, with guardrails, permission checks and approvals overseen by administrators, so the resulting automations are explainable, auditable and fully traceable.
Catalyst sits inside a broader enterprise service management platform, so teams build and run automations in the same place where they track requests, manage assets and orchestrate changes and approvals.
The underlying model, described in Serval’s earlier Series B announcement, is simple to state: a team outlines a process in natural language, the agent produces, tests and publishes the full automation, and the team refines it with further natural-language prompts or directly at the code level. The ambition is to replace a system of record, not to add another layer of spending on top of it.
The ServiceNow challenge
Serval pitches itself directly against established enterprise software, above all ServiceNow, and its chief executive told Reuters that the platform is a true alternative replacement for platforms like ServiceNow, not an additional layer of artificial intelligence spend.
The company says large enterprises are replacing ServiceNow with its platform, and that because it fully replaces the customer’s system of record, companies consolidate spending instead of adding new budget lines. That claim, if it holds at scale, is the investment case in a single sentence.
The company points to a concrete migration as evidence. It says an automotive manufacturer, identified in reporting as Lucid Motors, moved from ServiceNow to Serval in 45 days in a company-wide transition covering information-technology service management, the configuration management database, hardware and software asset management, and a long tail of departmental workflows.
Serval also says its annual recurring revenue has doubled every quarter since its Series B, and that two Fortune 20 companies became customers in the six months before the announcement, naming Fox Corporation, WPP, Live Nation and Ramp as organisations now building with it. Those figures are company claims, not independently audited results.
That positioning puts Serval in a crowded and well-funded contest over who runs enterprise work. ServiceNow itself is embedding artificial intelligence into its own workflows, as covered in our report on ServiceNow putting ChatGPT to work, so Serval is not displacing a static incumbent.
The question for buyers is whether a younger, agent-built system of record can match the reliability, compliance and breadth of the platforms it aims to replace, and whether a 45-day migration is repeatable or exceptional.
Why It Matters
The round matters because of its speed and its valuation, not only its size. Tripling in value in under a year, with three rounds in 12 months, signals that investors believe enterprise automation is shifting from chatbots that answer questions to agents that carry out work under controls.
Serval’s hiring plan points the same way: it plans to hire more than 500 people over the next 12 months, including more than 100 Automation Engineers for a new professional services arm, ProServal, whose staff will work inside enterprise teams to rebuild workflows from the ground up.
The control question will decide how far that shift goes. Serval says it separates the agent administrators use to build tools from the agent employees use to access approved workflows, with permissions and approvals controlled by information-technology and security teams, and with human approval still generally wanted for sensitive actions such as password resets and access changes.
That governance theme runs across the agent industry, as Microsoft’s agent-containment work shows in our report on its Execution Containers. Investors are betting that the company that gets both automation and control right will own the next enterprise platform.
Background
Serval was founded by Jake Stauch and Alex McLeod, who previously led product and engineering at Verkada. Its Series B, announced in December 2025, raised 75 million dollars at a 1 billion dollar valuation, also led by Sequoia.
Source: Unite.AI report
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