Serval is buying scale. The enterprise service management startup announced on October 29, 2026, that it raised a $150 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation, with Sequoia leading the round. The company plans to hire more than 500 people over the next 12 months, including more than 100 Automation Engineers for a new professional services arm called ProServal.
The financing marks Serval’s third funding round in 12 months. Elad Gil, Evantic, First Round, General Catalyst, and Redpoint participated, while Conviction and Headline joined as new investors.
Co-founders Jake Stauch, Serval’s chief executive, and Alex McLeod, its chief technology officer, authored the announcement. Stauch co-founded Serval in 2024, and the company has grown from 20 employees to 200 over the past year — a respectable expansion before adding another 500 people to the payroll.
Catalyst Targets Enterprise Workflows
Serval frames its mission as extending the building power engineers have to every employee inside large enterprises. Its platform centers on Catalyst, an automation agent that employees in IT, security, HR, finance, and legal can use to build and run code-based workflows without engineering experience.
The company says its AI agents turn business requirements into deterministic tools that run securely under strict enterprise controls. Those automations include guardrails, permission checks, and approvals overseen by administrators, because “let the model handle it” remains a weak enterprise security policy.
Catalyst sits inside Serval’s broader enterprise service management platform, where teams track requests, manage assets, and orchestrate changes and approvals. In an earlier Series B announcement, Serval described a process in which a team outlines a workflow in natural language and the AI agent produces, tests, and publishes the full automation.
Users can refine the result with more natural-language prompts or edit it directly at the code level. Serval says the workflows are explainable, auditable, permissioned, and fully traceable. The company also describes the approach as “vibe coding” for business operations, though the output still has to survive enterprise controls.
ServiceNow Rivalry Moves Into Expansion Mode
Serval says large enterprises are replacing ServiceNow with its platform rather than adding another tool beside it. Because Serval fully replaces the customer’s system of record, the company says customers consolidate spending instead of creating new budget line items.
One automotive manufacturer moved from ServiceNow to Serval in 45 days. The company-wide transition covered IT service management, the configuration management database, hardware and software asset management, and a long tail of departmental workflows.
Serval says its annual recurring revenue has doubled every quarter since its Series B, while two Fortune 20 companies became customers in the six months before the announcement. Fox Corporation, WPP, Live Nation, and Ramp are also building with Serval.
In its Series B post, Serval said customers were automating more than 50 percent of IT tickets, resolving help desk requests, provisioning access, onboarding and offboarding employees, and running compliance and reporting workflows automatically. The pitch is straightforward: replace repetitive service work with software that business teams can shape themselves.
Serval has raised $127 million from investors according to another company description, while the new Series C brings the announced financing to $150 million. The company’s AI-assisted IT support software has also been described as valued at $1 billion, a figure that sits below the $3 billion valuation attached to the Series C announcement.
Stauch said customer knowledge will be central to the company’s advantage: “We feel like customer insight increasingly becomes the moat.” He added, “Everyone has access to the same [AI] tools … so we have to know things about our customers that no one else knows.”
ProServal will put that idea into practice. More than 100 Automation Engineers will work alongside enterprise teams to spot automation opportunities, rework existing processes, and identify problems they can fix.
Serval currently has offices in San Francisco and New York and plans to open offices in additional cities, including one already planned in Austin. The Triangle is also under consideration for automation engineering roles, with Stauch pointing to the region’s young university talent and candidates who understand how to use AI in daily life, whether or not they hold a computer science degree.
The hiring plan gives Serval a larger workforce, a services operation, and a direct challenge to ServiceNow. Its success now depends on turning fast customer adoption into durable enterprise infrastructure — a harder task than raising money, even when the money arrives in nine figures.
Based on
- Serval Raises $150M Series C at $3B Valuation to Hire Over 500 — unite.ai
- Serval raises $150M at $3B valuation — axios.com
- Serval says Triangle in “consideration” for hiring growth – Axios Raleigh — axios.com
- Upwind Closes $400 Million Series C at $3.8 Billion Valuation as Revenue Quadruples in 2026 | Currency News | Financial and Business News | Markets Insider — markets.businessinsider.com
- Seraphis Group Sets Aside $3 Billion for AI Startups, Betting on Patient Capital Over Hype | Currency News | Financial and Business News | Markets Insider — markets.businessinsider.com
