Another startup that aims to help companies build, secure and orchestrate AI agents has raised a whopping seed round. 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 the heads of investors and made them 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 grad — its founder brings decades of experience: Sri Viswanath, a former Coatue investor. He left the full-time VC role this fall to launch 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 of Atlassian, where I led the cloud transformation and scaled the engineering organization to 7,000+,” Viswanath tells TechCrunch. “The round came together through longstanding relationships.”
Second, he doesn’t build a single-purpose product that solves a narrow problem, but tries to build the entire agentic orchestration layer that handles everything from coding to back-end infrastructure, stepping in where needed.
“Most tools take existing workflows and layer agents on top,” he said, adding that his startup’s product “starts with the problem itself and then designs and builds the right solution from the ground up, whether it 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.
Still, Sycamore enters a field filled with competition in every direction, even with the confidence vote of a hefty seed round. There are countless small startups working on this, from the very small (like Maisa AI) to nascent startups raising even bigger rounds, like OpenAI-backed Isara, which raised $94 million, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. (This one is run by a couple of 23-year-old researchers.)
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
13.-15. October 2026
Then there are those in growth mode like Airia, which announced a $100 million raise in September, and Port, which announced a $100 million round in December. The top model makers also want to own the enterprise agent platform, among them 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 will also have it.
So this is a big hill to climb in an as yet unrealized but widely expected massive market. 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.