Serval Raises $150m at $3bn to Take On ServiceNow

Serval, a San Francisco start-up that uses AI agents to automate IT and other back-office requests, has raised $150m in a Series C round led by Sequoia. The round values the company at $3bn, Serval said in a press release on Business Wire on 29 October.

Existing investors Elad Gil, Evantic, First Round, General Catalyst and Redpoint joined the round, along with new investors Conviction and Headline. Serval has now raised $277m in total.

It is Serval’s third round in 12 months. The company announced its Series A in October 2025 and a $75m Series B in December 2025. Reuters reported that the new round triples the $1bn valuation Serval reached in December.

What Serval sells

Serval describes itself as an AI-native enterprise service management platform. In plain terms, it is a help desk and request system for internal teams: the software that employees use to ask for a new laptop, request access to an app or report a problem, and that staff use to track and resolve those requests.

The company’s main product is Catalyst, which it calls an automation agent. In a blog post signed by Jake Stauch and Alex McLeod, Serval says Catalyst lets employees in IT, security, HR, finance and legal build automated workflows “with no engineering experience required”. The AI agents turn a description of what a team needs into code, which Serval calls “deterministic tools”, that then runs within limits set by administrators, with “guardrails, permission checks, and approvals”.

Catalyst sits inside a wider platform for tracking requests, managing assets and handling approvals. Serval says companies including Fox, Live Nation, Notion, Ramp and Lucid Motors use it. Its blog adds the advertising group WPP to that list.

Where the money goes

Serval says it will hire more than 500 people over the next 12 months. More than 100 of them will be “Automation Engineers” for ProServal, a new professional services arm that will place staff inside large customers to find work that can be automated and redesign processes. Roughly half of those engineers will be recent graduates who go through a four-week Serval training programme, according to the blog.

The company also says it will keep investing in Catalyst. It gives no revenue figure, but says its annual recurring revenue has doubled every quarter since its Series B, and that two Fortune 20 companies became customers in the past six months. Neither claim can be checked independently.

Why Serval is pitching a replacement, not an add-on

Serval’s pitch is aimed squarely at ServiceNow, the dominant supplier of IT service management software to large companies. The blog says large organisations are “replacing ServiceNow with Serval”, and gives one example: an unnamed automotive manufacturer that switched across IT service management, its configuration database and asset tracking in 45 days. Reuters also named Workday as a rival.

That is a bolder claim than most AI start-ups make. Many sell agents that sit on top of an existing system. Serval wants to be the system itself, arguing that replacing the old platform saves money instead of adding another bill.

ServiceNow is not standing still. This week it formed an 11-member AI alliance with OpenAI and Anthropic, and its plugin arrived inside ChatGPT as the two companies widened their partnership. Large customers also have years of processes built into the platforms they already run. Changing those takes time and risk.

The ProServal plan is the most telling detail. Putting more than 100 automation engineers inside customers suggests that, even with AI agents writing the workflows, big companies still need people to work out what to automate. That makes Serval’s model partly a services business, which tends to grow more slowly than pure software. Investors are clearly betting otherwise. One of Serval’s named customers, Ramp, raised $1.85bn at a $60bn valuation as it pushes deeper into AI for finance teams.