This startup wants to make enterprise software look more like a router

Every new technology creates a new environment in which we operate, but it is not clear how AI will do this. One possibility is that the interface disappears completely.

That’s the vision of Josh Sirota, who founded startup Eragon last August and just raised $12 million at a post-money valuation of $100 million to build a powerful AI operating system for enterprise customers.

There’s a simple premise: “Software is dead,” Sirota says. Buttons, dialog boxes, and drop-down menus are a thing of the past, and future actions will be done by prompting. Eragon attempts to offer the full suite of business software — Salesforces, Snowflakes, Tableaus, Jiras — through an LLM interface.

Sirota, who worked on go-to-market teams at Oracle and Salesforce, admits he had a bit of a quarter-life crisis in the run-up to moving to San Francisco and launching Eragon with a small team from a live-work loft across the street from the Giants’ baseball park. On a recent sunny Wednesday, the dining room table held a bottle of Moët, several Mac Minis, and a copy of Eragon, the Christopher Paolini fantasy novel that gave the company its name — in the tradition of Palantir and Anduril, also borrowed from fantasy worlds.

Sirota’s experience implementing the world’s best enterprise software convinced investors of his “fit for the institutional market.” His backers include Ariel Zuckerberg at Long Journey Ventures, Soma Capital, Axiom Partners, and strategy angels Mike Knoop and Elias Torres.

“We see huge potential for Eragon to become the connective tissue of how modern teams work and make decisions,” said Sandhya Venkatachalam of Axiom. Eragon’s technical talent includes Rishabh Tiwari, a computer science doctoral student at Berkeley, and Vin Agarwal, a Ph.D. at MIT; Together they are building the company’s technology stack.

At Eragon’s Customer Center of Excellence — a distressed white sofa — Sirota explains how the company eats its dog food. Eragon trains open source models like Qwen and Kimi on customer datasets, links to company email accounts and other resources. When Sirota wants to bring on a new customer — he explains with Dedalus Labs, which will adopt the tool this week — he asks in natural language, the software automatically assigns each new user’s credentials, spins up a new Eragon instance in the cloud, and begins the setup workflow.

Sirota expects Eragon to be the software executive asking to analyze which deals might go wrong, or what steps need to be taken to improve supply chain lead times, and then assign agents to take action. Do you want a dashboard? Just have Eragon spin one.

The demo is compelling, but it’s easy to imagine edge queries that baffle the software, or failures that are difficult to audit. Sirota even uses Eragon to demonstrate automatic invoice approval — the system processes invoices as soon as they arrive in his inbox — which prompted this reporter to consider sending one, just to see what would happen. (Reader, I did not do that.)

The security concerns raised by AI customers are significant, but for now the company is trying to work out the kinks in real workplaces; Eragon is now used in a few large companies and dozens of startups. Nico Lacqua, CEO of Corgi, an insurance startup that raised $180 million after exiting Y Combinator last year, called Eragon “the best AI applied to enterprises on the market.”

“Most of the data we have should remain secure and behind our cloud,” Lacqua said. “Eragon trains state-of-the-art models for us on our data and deploys them in our own environment.”

This is central to Eragon’s offering: a company’s data stays within its own servers and security environment, and has its own model weights – key parameters that determine how the AI ​​behaves. Sirota expects models trained on years or decades of corporate data to become valuable assets in their own right. While frontier labs may have the most capable models, as long as companies have to access them via an API and without owning their configurations, Sirota believes Eragon will have an advantage in the market.

He compares the evolution of AI software to the move from mainframe to PC: Frontier Labs offers robust centralized services, but widespread enterprise adoption will depend on local tools for ad hoc purposes. Companies will need agents and models for their specific purposes and will want to control them.

A few days later, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang offered a similar view at GTC, Nvidia’s annual developer conference, arguing that agentic AI tools for enterprises will replace our current approach to white-collar work: “It’s no different than how Windows enabled us to build personal computers… Every single SaaS company will become Agentic as a Service.”

Huang’s comments relate to Nvidia’s new initiative, NemoClaw, which aims to make it easier for OpenClaw customers to work within secure enterprise systems. It’s a sign that Sirota is on to something, and that competition from everyone, from frontier labs to prototype covers, will be fierce.

Sirota did not hesitate to say that he expects Eragon to become a billion-dollar company by the end of the year. He knows of the oft-cited MIT figure that 95% of corporate AI experiments fail, but he jokes that’s because senior executives don’t know what their employees do all day. Eragon aims to give them something they can really work with.