Serval raises $47 million to bring AI agents to IT service management

Some startups boast reputable financial backers – but just as important is having reputable clients.

It’s one of the main points of pride for Serval, an AI company that announced a $47 million funding round on Tuesday. The round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from large venture firms such as First Round, General Catalyst and Box Group. But even more impressive than the funders is the company’s client list, which includes major AI players like Perplexity, Mercor, and Together AI.

In general, Serval uses agentic AI models to automate IT service management, but the company has a unique approach that leverages the powers of agentic AI while avoiding many of its pitfalls. A single agent is used to code internal automation processes for everyday tasks, such as software licensing or device provisioning. The founders see it as a kind of coding tool, supervised by an IT manager, but doing most of the work on its own. A separate help desk agent responds to user requests by calling those tools on demand, following the rules that the tool specifies.

Serval CEO Jake Stauch says the key is to make the process of building the tool as simple as possible.

“We don’t want them to feel the marginal cost of building this automation,” Stoch told TechCrunch. “We want to make it easy to automate something forever instead of doing it manually once.”

Splitting the task into two agents—one to build the tools and one to use them—also gives managers a way to monitor permissions. When an automation system is created, the manager will set rules for when it can be used, providing an additional line of defense against overzealous help desk agents.

Enterprise customers are keenly aware of the dangers of a rogue AI system, which is part of the reason why Serval decided against a single, multi-purpose help desk agent.

“You don’t want someone to go into Slack and say, ‘Hey, I want to delete all the data in the company,’ and a very helpful AI agent will say, ‘Great, I’ll delete all the data,'” Stauch told TechCrunch. “Instead, it will say, ‘Hey, I don’t have a tool to delete all the company data. But I do have a tool to reset your password or do one of these other tasks.'”

Because the tools themselves are deterministic, they can include very complex permissions, such as allowing certain actions only after a multi-factor authentication process or within a certain time frame. Anytime those rules need to change, there’s an AI agent ready to dive into the code base and change it.

It’s a new approach to the very common problem of how to supervise agentic AI systems. “You want to have complete visibility and complete control of what the AI ​​agent is doing,” says Stoch. “And you can do this by using Serval to create those tools and customize the permissions and approvals behind them.”