Former Coattue partner raises $65M seed round for enterprise AI agent startup

Yet another startup aimed at helping businesses build, secure, and integrate AI agents has raised a large seed round. Sycamore on Monday announced a $65 million seed round led by Coatue and Lightspeed, with a long list of angels including OpenAI chief scientist Bob McGrew, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, and others.

Several factors turned the heads of investors and drew them to participate in such a large round out of the gate. First, unlike many startups in this space, Sycamore is not led by a 19-year-old Y Combinator grad – its founder brings decades of experience: Sri Viswanath, a former Coatue investor. He left the full-time VC role in the fall to launch Sycamore, where he is CEO.

“I spent over 20 years building global enterprise platforms at Sun Microsystems, VMware, Groupon, and as CTO at Atlassian, where I led the cloud transformation and scaled the org to 7,000+,” Viswanath tells TechCrunch. “The cycle met with a long relationship.”

Second, he doesn’t build a single-purpose product that solves one small problem but tries to build a whole layer of agent orchestration that handles everything from coding to back-end infrastructure, coming in wherever needed.

“A lot of tools take existing workflows and layer agents on top,” he said, adding that his product startup “starts with the problem itself and then designs and builds the right solution from scratch, whether that involves agents, backends, front ends, or data integration,” he said.

He said Sycamore has already won the favor of large corporate clients but declined to name them.

However, even with the majority seed vote of confidence, Sycamore enters a field full of competition in all areas. There are a number of small startups working on this, from the smallest (such as Maisa AI), to emerging startups raising even larger rounds, such as OpenAI-backed Isara, which raised $94 million, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. (This one is run by two 23-year-old investigators.)

Then there are the growth giants like Airia, which announced a $100 million raise in September, and Port, which announced a $100 million round in December. Top modelers also want to own the enterprise agent platform, among them OpenAI with Frontier and Anthropic with its ever-growing Cowork. If that’s not enough, big AI cloud providers like Microsoft Azure with Foundry, and AWS with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore are looking for it, too.

So this is a big hill to climb in a major market that has yet to materialize but is widely expected. Other VC firms involved in the Sycamore raise include Abstract Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, 8VC, Fellows Fund, and E14 Fund. Other notable angels include Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, Rubrik and Wisdom AI co-founder Soham Mazumdar, and Zapier and Ndea co-founder Mike Knoop.