AI startup Serval raises $150m at $3bn valuation, takes aim at ServiceNow

The company, which had about 20 employees in January and now has around 200, expects to have at least 700 by the end of next year, Stauch said. Serval's third round in 12 months follows a $75 million Series B in December that valued it at $1 billion.

Serval's co-founders, CEO Jake Stauch and CTO Alex McLeod, met at security-camera company Verkada. Serval builds automations in an AI agent called Catalyst. The founders bet that AI-written code can make ServiceNow's drag-and-drop and custom configuration model cheaper.

Stauch said they made a list of the biggest enterprise software companies and asked which ones AI could disrupt. ServiceNow was "two or three on that list." The choice to compete head-on was deliberate. "It was just a fight that we decided to pick," Stauch said. The similar company name, he said, is a coincidence: "I really like the cat name."

"If workflow automation is about to be disrupted," Stauch said, "then actually what we're building is not just a solution for these customers we've been talking to, but it's actually a new generation of massive enterprise software company." He dismissed the idea that incumbents can simply bolt AI onto existing products. "I would be very curious around the actual go-live adoption of those products," he said.

Serval lists advertising conglomerate WPP as a customer and says two Fortune 20 companies have converted in the last six months, though they cannot be named. "Those are two names we wish we could name and we cannot," Stauch said. Serval says annual recurring revenue has doubled every quarter since the Series B, but the company will not give dollar figures.

Sequoia partner Anas Biad said: "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." Asked about an eventual sale, Biad said: "Our mission at Sequoia is to help the daring build legendary companies, from idea to IPO and beyond."

ServiceNow pushed back. Sean Regan, general manager of Flow by ServiceNow, said the incumbent's edge is in governance at scale. "Every AI agent needs trusted data, workflows, and governance to act on. That can't be easily replicated," he said in a statement. "Anyone can build a great demo. Running mission-critical operations for a global enterprise, securely and with every AI action governed, is the hard part, and it's what we do every day." ServiceNow's answer is Flow, a standalone AI service desk launched Oct. 1 at a published price of $2 per conversation. "It deploys in a day, and customers don't have to give up the governance and operational depth only our platform provides," Regan said.

Regan pointed to ServiceNow's third-quarter results, released Wednesday: agentic AI consumption in production up more than 13 times year over year, a 98% renewal rate, AI IT service management deal volume up nearly 80%, and a 2026 AI annual contract value target raised to $1.7 billion from $1.5 billion. The stock, however, fell more than 17% in after-hours trading Wednesday and was down more than 26% in Thursday trading after earnings missed estimates.

Serval is launching a services arm, ProServal, and plans to hire more than 100 Automation Engineers over the next year, about half straight from college with four weeks of training. Stauch cited the Jevons paradox: "We instead say, well, now I want 100 things done instead of just the 10."