Yet another startup that aims to help enterprises build, secure and orchestrate AI agents has generated a major round of honking. Sycamore on Monday announced a $65 million seed round led by Coatue and Lightspeed, with a long list of angels including former OpenAI chief scientist Bob McGrew, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi and others.
A few things turned investors’ heads and attracted them to participate in such a large round out of the gate. First, unlike many startups in this space, Sycamore isn’t led by a 19-year-old Y Combinator graduate — its founder brings decades of experience: Sri Viswanath, a former Coatue investor. He left his full-time VC role in the fall to start Sycamore, where he is CEO.
“I’ve spent over 20 years building enterprise platforms at global scale at Sun Microsystems, VMware, Groupon, and as CTO at Atlassian, where I led cloud transformation and scaled the engineering organization to 7,000+,” Viswanath tells TechCrunch. “The round came together through long-standing relationships.”
Second, it doesn’t build a one-off product that solves a narrow problem, but tries to build the entire orchestration layer that handles everything from coding to back-end infrastructure, tapping where needed.
“Most tools use existing workflows and layer agents,” he said, adding that his startup’s product “starts with the problem itself and then designs and builds the right solution from scratch, whether that involves agents, back-end systems, front ends, or data integrations,” he said.
He said Sycamore has already gained traction with some large enterprise customers, but declined to name them.
However, even with a big round vote of confidence, Sycamore enters a field full of competition in every direction. There are countless tiny startups working on this, ranging from the very small (like Maisa AI), to the fledgling startups raising even bigger rounds, like OpenAI-backed Isara, which raised $94 million. Wall Street Journal reported last week. (It is run by a couple of 23-year-old researchers.)
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, California
|
13-15 October 2026
Then there are those in development mode like Ariawhich announced a $100 million raise in September and Port, which announced a $100 million round in December. Leading model makers also want to own the enterprise agent platform, including OpenAI with Frontier and Anthropic with its ever-expanding Cowork. If that’s not enough, the big AI cloud providers like Microsoft Azure with Foundry and AWS with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore want it too.
So this is a big hill to climb in a huge market that has yet to materialize but is widely expected. Other VC firms that participated in Sycamore’s 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.
