Serval raises $150M Series C led by Sequoia at a $3B valuation

Serval, a San Francisco company whose software answers employees' IT and HR requests and writes the automations behind them, raised a $150 million Series C led by Sequoia at a $3 billion valuation, the company said in a blog post on October 29. The valuation is triple the $1 billion Serval announced in December, and the round arrived on the day ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), the incumbent Serval says its customers are replacing, had its worst day on record.

ServiceNow's shares fell 27% on Thursday, October 29, CNBC reported, after third-quarter results that revived worries about AI upending traditional software businesses. The slide began before Serval's news: the stock fell more than 17% in after-hours trading on October 28, according to Fortune.

What Serval sells

Serval was founded in 2024 by Jake Stauch, its chief executive, and Alex McLeod, its chief technology officer, who met at the security-camera company Verkada. The company began with routine IT work such as fixing computer problems and granting software access, Reuters reported in December, and now handles HR, finance, security and legal requests as well.

Its AI agent, Catalyst, turns a workflow an employee describes in plain language into code, with permission checks and approvals controlled by administrators. Stauch told Reuters that customers still generally want a person to approve sensitive actions such as password resets and application access. Serval also sells the records the automations run on, from request tickets to hardware and software asset records, which it says lets a customer switch off ServiceNow instead of adding a layer on top of it.

Serval names Fox Corporation (Nasdaq: FOXA), WPP (NYSE: WPP), Live Nation (NYSE: LYV) and Ramp as customers, and says two Fortune 20 companies signed on in the past six months. Serval says one automaker moved its IT service management, configuration management database and asset management off ServiceNow in 45 days. Stauch told Reuters that the electric-vehicle maker Lucid Motors (Nasdaq: LCID) moved from ServiceNow to Serval in 45 days, and listed Lucid among Serval's customers in his own post on X.

Serval says its annual recurring revenue has doubled every quarter since the Series B, without giving dollar figures.

What the money is for

Serval said it will hire more than 500 people in the next 12 months. More than 100 of them will be automation engineers for ProServal, a new professional services arm that places them inside customers' teams to find work to automate and redesign the processes around it. About half will be recent college graduates who go through a four-week training program. The round will also pay to expand Catalyst, Reuters reported.

Serval had just under 30 employees in December, Reuters reported then, and has about 200 now, Fortune reported, and Stauch expects at least 700 by the end of next year, roughly what 500 more hires would make. He called the back-to-back rounds "opportunistic" and said Serval has "years and years of runway in the bank."

Three rounds in 12 months

Serval called the Series C its third round in 12 months. Sequoia led it, with Elad Gil, Evantic, First Round, General Catalyst and Redpoint investing again and Conviction and Headline joining as new investors.

Source: Serval's Series A release, its later announcements and Reuters. The Series A valuation is PitchBook data for August 2025, as Reuters reported it; the Wall Street Journal, also citing PitchBook, put it at about $220 million in October. The Series B figure is its headline valuation. Anas Biad, the Sequoia partner on the deal, told Fortune the Series C figure is post-money.

Against December's $1 billion, the valuation has tripled in 322 days, by SaasBuzz's count, and it is about 13 times the PitchBook figure from August 2025. The new $150 million is more than half of the $277 million Serval has raised since its founding, and equal to 5% of the post-money valuation.

The December figure comes with a caveat. The Wall Street Journal reported in February that Serval "closed a private deal with venture-capital giant Sequoia in December that valued it at less than $400 million," and that days later Serval announced another funding round that valued it at more than $1 billion. PitchBook reported in June that the December round, led by Sequoia at a $1 billion valuation, combined two classes of preferred shares priced at different valuations; Serval did not respond to its request for comment. Shaun Maguire, a Sequoia partner, wrote on X in June, without naming Serval, that "this has happened ~5 times during my 7 years at Sequoia," when other investors were willing to pay far more for a hot company, usually in AI. Measured from the Journal's reported price, $3 billion is more than 7.5 times higher.

What Serval says it does differently

"It was just a fight that we decided to pick," Stauch told Fortune of taking on ServiceNow. In the announcement, Stauch and McLeod wrote that large companies are "replacing ServiceNow with Serval," and gave their reason.

And because we fully replace the system of record, we're helping companies consolidate spend and reduce costs, rather than adding more line items to the budget.Jake Stauch and Alex McLeod, Serval's co-founders, in the company's announcement, October 29, 2026

Stauch made the same case to Reuters, calling Serval "a true alternative replacement for platforms like ServiceNow" rather than "an additional layer of AI spend." Of incumbents adding AI to their existing products, he told Fortune: "I would be very curious around the actual go-live adoption of those products."

ServiceNow's reply came from Sean Regan, general manager of Flow by ServiceNow, in a statement to Fortune: "Anyone can build a great demo. Running mission-critical operations for a global enterprise, securely and with every AI action governed, is the hard part, and it's what we do every day." Flow, a standalone AI service desk ServiceNow launched on October 1, can be running in a day and is priced at $2 per conversation, Fortune reported.

On the October 28 earnings call, Chairman and CEO Bill McDermott said that with Flow, stand-alone AI service desk providers were "no longer required," and called the product "a problem for the competition," according to a transcript published by The Motley Fool. ServiceNow said its renewal rate held at 98% in the quarter, and McDermott said, "The business has never been in better shape than it is right now."

What the investors are paying for

Serval's backers are paying for growth that outsiders cannot yet measure, because Serval publishes no revenue. ServiceNow reported $3,988 million of subscription revenue for the third quarter alone, $988 million more than Serval's entire valuation. Serval's $3 billion is less than a fifth of the $15.8 billion in subscription revenue ServiceNow expects for 2026, the midpoint of its forecast.

Sequoia's case rests on a precedent it lived through. When it preempted the Series B in December, the firm wrote that it had last heard such customer feedback "16 years ago, when we partnered with ServiceNow." In Fortune's October 29 report, Biad said: "From the data we've seen, Serval is on a trajectory to be the fastest-growing top-down Enterprise system-of-record company in history."

Dev Ittycheria, who started BladeLogic and describes himself on X as a partner and senior advisor at Sequoia, drew the same parallel in a post that Sequoia's account reposted. He wrote that he inherited BMC's Remedy business after BMC bought BladeLogic.

I saw firsthand how ServiceNow used the shift from on-premise software to SaaS to disrupt incumbents like Remedy and Peregrine. History is repeating itself.Dev Ittycheria, partner and senior advisor at Sequoia, on X, October 29, 2026

Both companies are also putting their own engineers inside customers: Serval's ProServal will place more than 100. Gina Mastantuono, ServiceNow's president and CFO, told analysts that its forward deployed engineers had helped speed up customers' time to value by 80% this year, and that ServiceNow is building more of those deployment teams into its forecast. Tyler Radke of Citi told CNBC that the lack of an immediate payoff from that newly formed team was one factor spooking investors.