Serval has raised $150 million at a $3 billion valuation as the fast-growing enterprise software company steps up its challenge to ServiceNow.
The Series C funding was led by Sequoia, which also led Serval’s $75 million Series B in December, when the company was valued at $1 billion. The latest round takes Serval’s total funding to $277 million.
Existing investors including Elad Gil, Evantic, First Round, General Catalyst and Redpoint returned, while Conviction and Headline joined the round. Serval had about 20 employees in January and now has around 200; its chief executive and co-founder, Jake Stauch, expects that figure to reach at least 700 by the end of next year.
Serval’s bet on AI workflow automation
Stauch and co-founder Alex McLeod, the company’s chief technology officer, met at security-camera firm Verkada. When considering which established enterprise software companies could be disrupted by AI, they placed ServiceNow near the top of their list.
Serval argues that ServiceNow’s business is built around workflow automation, drag-and-drop tools and extensive configuration. Its founders believe AI-generated code could make that model significantly cheaper to replace.
“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.”
Serval lists advertising group WPP among its customers and says two Fortune 20 companies have switched to its platform in the past six months. It declined to name those businesses, while saying its annual recurring revenue had doubled every quarter since the Series B without disclosing figures.
The company’s platform uses an agent called Catalyst to build automations. Those automations can be tested in a separate environment with branching, access controls and audit logs before being published to another agent for employees to use.
McLeod said the product was designed to offer more than a coding assistant. “It’s not just enough to give people a coding agent,” he said.
Sequoia partner Anas Biad said the firm’s investment was based on Serval’s growth. “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,” he said.
Biad rejected the suggestion that Serval lacked proprietary technology compared with an established provider such as ServiceNow. “Serval has exceptional IP in the platform and system of record it has built, which customers are adopting at an incredible pace,” he said.
ServiceNow responds with new AI service
ServiceNow has defended the advantages of its existing platform, saying that trusted data, established workflows and governance are difficult for a start-up to replicate.
Sean Regan, general manager of Flow by ServiceNow, said: “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.”
The company launched Flow, a standalone AI service desk, on October 1. It can be deployed in a day without an implementation project, and new customers will be able to buy it by credit card, including businesses without an existing ServiceNow contract. Its published price is $2 per conversation.
ServiceNow said agentic AI consumption in production had risen more than 13 times year on year in the third quarter. It also reported a 98% renewal rate, an almost 80% increase in AI IT service management deal volume and raised its 2026 AI annual contract value target to $1.7 billion from $1.5 billion.
However, its shares fell more than 17% in after-hours trading following the results and were down more than 26% in Thursday trading. Third-quarter revenue of $4.11 billion was slightly ahead of expectations, but earnings of $1 a share fell short of the $1.02 analysts had expected. Its fourth-quarter revenue forecast of between $4.25 billion and $4.26 billion was also below the $4.36 billion consensus estimate.
Serval expands its services operation
Serval is also creating a services arm, ProServal, and plans to recruit more than 100 automation engineers over the next year. About half are expected to come directly from university, receive four weeks of training and then work within customer businesses to rebuild their workflows.
Stauch said the company was raising money opportunistically and had “years and years of runway in the bank”. He argued that greater efficiency would lead businesses to demand more automated work rather than simply reducing the number of tasks they undertake.
