Every new technology creates a new environment in which we work, but it is not clear how artificial intelligence will do this. One possibility is that the interface disappears entirely.
This is the vision of Josh Sirota, who founded the startup Eragon in August and just raised $12 million in a $100 million post-money valuation to build an AI operating system for enterprise customers.
There’s a simple thesis: “Software is dead,” says Sirota. Buttons and dialog boxes and drop-down menus are a thing of the past, and future tasks will be prompted. Eragon strives to deliver the entire business software suite—Salesforces, Snowflakes, Tableaus, and Jiras—through an LLM interface.
Sirota, who has worked on go-to-market teams at Oracle and Salesforce, admits she suffered through a quarter-life crisis before moving to San Francisco and launching Eragon with a small team out of a live loft across the street from the Giants’ baseball park. On a recent, sunny Wednesday, the dining room table includes a bottle of Moët, several Mac minis and a copy of Eragon, the Christopher Paolini fantasy novel that gave the company its name — in the tradition of Palantir and Anduril, which also borrowed from fantasy worlds.
Sirota’s experience implementing the world’s leading enterprise software convinced investors of his “founder market fit.” Backers include Arielle Zuckerberg at Long Journey Ventures, Soma Capital, Axiom Partners and strategic angels Mike Knoop and Elias Torres.
“We see huge potential for Eragon to become the connective tissue for how modern teams operate and make decisions,” said Axiom’s Sandhya Venkatachalam. Eragon’s technical talent includes Rishabh Tiwari, a Berkeley Ph.D. in computer science, and Vin Agarwal, an MIT Ph.D. together, they build the company’s technology stack.
At Eragon’s customer center of excellence—a white sofa—Sirota demonstrates how the company eats its own dog food. Eragon trains open source models like Qwen and Kimi on customer datasets and links to corporate email accounts and other resources. When Sirota wants to bring on a new customer—he demonstrates this with Dedalus Labs, which is adopting the tool this week—he asks at a natural-language prompt, and the software automatically assigns each new user’s credentials, spins up a new instance of Eragon in the cloud, and starts an onboarding workflow.
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Sirota expects Eragon to be the go-to software executives go to for analysis on which deals are likely to fail or steps to take to improve supply chain lead times, and then assign agents to take action. Want a dashboard? Just ask Eragon to spin one.
The demo is exciting, but it’s easy to imagine cutting edge queries that confuse the software or failures that are hard to control. Sirota even uses Eragon to demonstrate automatic invoice approval—the system processes invoices as they arrive in its own inbox—which prompted this reporter to consider submitting one, just to see what would happen. (Reader, I didn’t.)
The security concerns raised by AI agents are big, but for now the company is trying to solve the problems in real workplaces. Eragon is now used by a handful of large enterprises and dozens of startups. Nico Laqua, CEO of Corgi, an insurance startup that raised $180 million after emerging from Y Combinator last year, called Eragon “the best applied enterprise AI on the market.”
“Most of the data we have has to stay secure and behind our own cloud,” Laqua said. “Eragon trains state-of-the-art models for us on our data and deploys them in our own environment.”
This is central to Eragon’s scope: a company’s data remains within its own servers and security environment, and it owns its own model weights — the underlying parameters that determine how an AI behaves. Sirota expects models trained on years or decades of enterprise data to become valuable assets in their own right. And while frontier labs may have the most capable models, since companies need to access them via APIs and not own their configurations, Sirota believes Eragon will have an edge in the market.
He compares the evolution of AI software to the transition from mainframes to the personal computer: Frontier Labs offers powerful, centralized services, but mass enterprise adoption will depend on local tools for personalized purposes. Companies will need agents and models for their specific purposes and want to control them.
A few days later, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang offers a similar view at GTC, Nvidia’s annual developer conference, arguing that AI tools for business will replace our existing approach to white-collar work: “It’s no different than how Windows enabled us to build personal computers … every SaaS company will become Agentic-as-aS.”
Huang’s comments relate to Nvidia’s new initiative, NemoClaw, which aims to make it easier for OpenClaw agents to work on secure enterprise systems. It’s a sign both that Sirota is on to something – and that competition from everyone from frontier labs to model wraps will be stiff.
Sirota is undeterred, saying he expects Eragon to be a billion-dollar company by the end of the year. He’s aware of the oft-cited MIT figure that 95% of corporate AI tests fail to catch, but jokes that it’s because senior executives don’t know what their employees do all day. Eragon aims to give them something they can actually work with.
