Serval

I don't know whether to cut costs, raise prices, borrow money, hire, stop hiring, invest, pull back or just wait.

Now if any of that sounds familiar then this episode is for you because the truth is we can't control inflation, we can't control the Reserve Bank.

we can't control interest rates, we can't control government decisions, we can't control whether customers are feeling confident or cautious this month.

But we can control how we manage the business in front of us and in uncertain times the goal is not panic, the goal is clarity.

Protect what keeps the business stable, plug the leaks that are draining the profit, preserve the parts of the business that create future revenue and that is the grit and grace profit method.

Protect the cash, plug the leaks, preserve the profit engine.

If you do nothing else after this episode I want you to do this, set aside 30 minutes this week, look at your cash position, name your top three profit leaks and then choose one action to take immediately and it could be chasing your debtors, it could be reducing prices, sorry reviewing prices, cutting unused costs, calling your best customers, might be building a 12-week cash flow forecast, But do not wait for the economy to feel perfect before you take control of the business in front of you.

Because the businesses that get through uncertain times are not always the biggest, they are always the clearest.

Now to startup funding.

Enterprise automation startup Serval has tripled its valuation in less than a year.

The San Francisco company announced a $150 million Series C round on Thursday, led by Sequoia, valuing it at $3 billion, up from $1 billion last December.

The round brings Serval's total funding to $277 million, with new investors, conviction, and headline joining existing backers, including General Catalyst and First Round.

Serval sells an AI-powered service management platform that lets employees build automations in plain language.

And it is pitching itself as a replacement for legacy information technology help desk software at large organizations.

Its rise reflects investor appetite for AI agents that take direct aim at established enterprise software.

On the other hand, autonomy is very scary in the enterprise.

Serval is the boundary.

Serval is the guardrails.

We are the way that a large enterprise with a lot of rules and approvals and process and politics can adopt these tools safely and comfortably at scale.

Hi, listeners.

Welcome back to No Priors.

Today, Elad and I are here with Jake Stauch, co-founder and CEO of Serval.

Serval, with all the speed of the African wildcat, is trying to attack ServiceNow and more broadly, bringing the power of code generation to IT and enterprise teams overall.

In fact, I think a lot of people don't even understand what kind of work needs to be done on the back end to get this stuff done.

Earlier this year, we had the CEO of Serval on the podcast, and it was very interesting to hear how they are doing.

And I was very curious, how are these two products different? And how would you personally compare them?

Yeah, look, I think I'll start by saying enterprises need secure execution, and this is where ServiceNow really wins, right? We have the foundation for enterprises and the context and the control that they need to scale confidently.

I'm Jake.

I'm the co-founder and CEO of Serval.

Serval is an AI native platform for IT teams.

We help automate help desk requests, onboarding, off-boarding, just-in-time access requests.

Basically, the long tail of things that IT has to do.

It's hard to look at great customer feedback and have the skepticism and the cynicism to say, "I don't think this is working.

We should do something else." And you understand how your solution is really gonna solve it for a big enough part of the market.

And then that experience of building hardware and software platforms is what led me to Verkada before leaving to start Serval about a year and a half ago.