Sierra, the AI startup co-founded by OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor, raised $175 million in a funding round that values the startup at $4.5 billion.

Sierra is another spin-out from Taylor and Google alumnus Clay Bavor: An AI-powered customer-service chatbot to be marketed for sale to companies the size of WeightWatchers, not to mention Sirius XM; there's an "agent" piece as well There it integrates with other systems throughout enterprises to execute on behalf of their clients, no human touching needed.

Competition certainly doesn't lack in the space of chatbots. Sierra, however, claims its technology is less prone to hallucinations - that is, the made-up facts that AI models occasionally spew.
Sierra also lets customers customize its AI's personality to their corporate brand, using a "constellation" of generative AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, among others, to complete tasks and check for accuracy.

Taylor and Bavor have decades of experience in customer service technology. Taylor spent nearly a decade at Salesforce, and years ago founded Quip, which Salesforce bought for $750 million in the summer of 2016. Bavor managed Gmail and Google Drive at Google, among other consumer-facing products.

Taylor met Bavor while at Google, where he worked before several years as Facebook's CTO. At Google, Taylor is widely credited with helping launch Google Maps. Years later, he'd oversee the Twitter board through the social media site's takeover by Elon Musk.
Investors in Sierra's latest round included ICONIQ and Thrive Capital. Greenoaks Capital led the round, which brings Sierra's total raised to $285 million, per Crunchbase.