Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and ex-Google executive Clay Bavor have joined forces to launch Sierra, a conversational AI platform for businesses. The duo recently secured a whopping $110 million in funding to bring AI ‘agents’ to the business world.

After Taylor’s resignation from Salesforce in January 2023, he met with Bavor, and their casual lunch meeting led to the inception of Sierra. The startup, based in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, has already amassed a team of 30 employees and counts WeightWatchers, SiriusXM, Sonos, and OluKai among its clients.

Despite facing stiff competition from major players like Salesforce in the AI market, Sierra has garnered significant support from prominent Silicon Valley investors, including Sequoia Capital and Benchmark. The company’s AI technology is currently facilitating hundreds of thousands of customer conversations every month.

Taylor, now the CEO of Sierra, expressed his enthusiasm for democratizing AI for businesses of all sizes, emphasizing the potential for widespread AI deployment across various industries. While the adoption of conversational AI tools is still in its early stages, Sierra aims to make AI a standard feature for businesses, regardless of their technical expertise.