Former Coatue partner raises huge $65M seed for enterprise AI agent startup 

Yet another startup aiming to help enterprises build, secure and orchestrate AI agents has raised a honking big seed round. Sycamore on Monday announced a $65 million seed led by Coatue and Lightspeed, with a long list of angels including former OpenAI chief scientist Bob McGrew, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, and others. 

A few things turned investors’ heads and drew them to participate in such a big round out of the gate. First, unlike many startups in this space, Sycamore isn’t led by a 19-year-old Y Combinator grad — its founder brings decades of experience: Sri Viswanath, a former Coatue investor. He left the full-time VC role in the fall to launch Sycamore, where he is CEO. 

“I’ve spent over 20 years building enterprise platforms at global scale at Sun Microsystems, VMware, Groupon, and as CTO of Atlassian, where I led the cloud transformation and scaled the engineering org to 7,000+,” Viswanath tells TechCrunch. “The round came together through long-standing relationships.” 

Second, he’s not building a single-purpose product that solves one narrow problem but attempting to build the whole agentic orchestration layer that handles everything from coding to backend infrastructure, stepping in wherever needed.

“Most tools take existing workflows and layer agents on top,” he said, adding that his startup’s product “starts with the problem itself and then designs and builds the right solution from scratch, whether that involves agents, backend systems, frontends, or data integrations,” he said. 

He said Sycamore has already gained traction with some big enterprise customers but declined to name them.  

Yet, even with the vote of confidence of a hefty seed round, Sycamore is entering a field loaded with competition in every direction. There are countless tiny startups working on this, ranging from the very small (like Maisa AI), to nascent startups raising even bigger rounds, like OpenAI-backed Isara, which raised $94 million, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. (This one is run by a pair of 23-year-old researchers.)  

Then there are those in growth mode like Airia, which announced a $100 million raise in September, and Port, which announced a $100 million round in December. The top model makers also want to own the enterprise agent platform, among them OpenAI with Frontier and Anthropic with its ever-expanding Cowork. If that’s not enough, the big AI cloud providers like Microsoft Azure with Foundry, and AWS with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore want it, too. 

So this is a big hill to climb in an as-yet-unrealized but widely expected massive market. Other VC firms that participated in Sycamore’s raise include Abstract Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, 8VC, Fellows Fund, and E14 Fund. Other notable angels include Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest; Rubrik and Wisdom AI co-founder Soham Majumdar; and Zapier and Ndea co-founder Mike Knoop.