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

Another startup that aims to help organizations build, secure, and orchestrate AI agents has raised a large 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 McGraw, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, and others.

There are a few things that turned investors’ minds and attracted them to participate in such a large round out of the gate. First, unlike many startups in this space, Sycamore isn’t led by a 19-year-old Y Combinator graduate — its founder has decades of experience: Sri Viswanath, a former Coatue investor. He left his full-time venture capital role in the fall to launch Sycamore, where he serves as CEO.

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

Second, it is not building a single-purpose product that solves one narrow problem, but is trying to build the entire agentic orchestration layer that handles everything from programming to back-end infrastructure, intervening where 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, back-end systems, front-ends, or data integration.”

He said Sycamore has already gained traction with some major corporate clients but declined to name them.

However, even with a vote of confidence in a huge seed round, Sycamore enters a field filled with competition in every direction. There are countless small startups working in this space, from very small ones (like Maisa AI), to fledgling startups raising larger rounds, like OpenAI-backed Isara, which raised $94 million, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. (This site is run by two 23-year-old researchers.)

Then there are companies in growth mode like Airia, which announced a $100 million raise in September, and Port, which announced a $100 million round in December. Major modellers also want to have an enterprise agent platform, including OpenAI with Frontier and Anthropic with the ever-expanding Cowork. If that’s not enough, major cloud AI providers like Microsoft Azure with Foundry, and AWS with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore want it too.

So, this is a big hill to climb in a huge market that has not yet been achieved but is widely anticipated. Other venture capital firms involved in Sycamore’s raise include Abstract Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, 8VC, Fellows Fund and E14 Fund. Other notable angels include Frederick Kirst, co-founder of Okta; Rubrik and Wisdom AI co-founder Soham Majumdar; and Zapier Undia co-founder Mike Knoop.