WorkOS raises $100M Series C at $2B valuation, betting on AI agent identity infrastructure

banger to kick it off.

An absolute banger. We have Michael from work.

There he is.

Michael from work OS. He is the co-founder and CEO. What's happening?

How you doing,

gentlemen? Great to see you. How's it going?

Great to see you.

Great to see you. It's been uh what has it been? A couple months.

It's been almost 6 months. Last time, uh we had you on, we were hanging out with Satcha Nadella on a historic day. Uh also another crazy day to join. But uh since this is the first time joining remotely, uh give us the update. Kind of reintroduce yourself for everyone.

Yeah, so I'm Michael Greenwich. I'm the founder and CEO of Work OS. and we are uh a infrastructure company that helps other software companies with enterprise features in their app. Not not exactly the thing people get the most excited about but it's the underlying infrastructure that allows people to sign in to things like chatbt and anthropic and perplexity with their company account with their enterprise account. So we often say that we help developers make their app enterprise ready and today we're really thrilled to announce our series C which we've raised $100 million. All right,

we got a mallet. We got a gong to hit.

Let's see. Let's see. Do we have the power?

Bring it down from the lamp.

It's like Thor reaching.

There it is. There it is.

There we go. Look at that.

There we go. We can take this.

Here we go.

100 on uh two billion.

That's right. That's right.

That is uh some great delusion

from your side. So we're going we haven't raised money actually in uh over four years. I think a lot of folks kind of forgot about us to be honest as a company. Um we were started

back in uh beginning of 2019. Um so this is over seven years we've been building building the company. Really the news today what's new with us is the last year or two has been all about AI and we have found ourselves supporting all these AI companies as they're rapidly just explosively growing. So whether it's it's like openai selling into the enterprise or you know claude like growing like crazy over the last few months or even cursor last year which you know like kind of came out from nowhere and took over um how people write software. Workhorse is powering all of these and we're helping all of them take you know the functionality that they've they've landed in AI and actually enable them to go sell that into these big you know customers that otherwise they wouldn't be able to get um and essentially unlock revenue. So, so over the last few years, you you joked that uh people forgot about you because you weren't uh raising what what were you doing? I'm assuming you were you were at different points probably turning turning down investor interests like what what was your kind of mindset and leading the team through that period?

Yeah, we were just building. I mean, I think at the end of the day to build infrastructure like we've created, there's no real shortcut for it. you just have to spend day after day, week after week, month after month, solving tens of thousands of small edge cases. Sometimes I say work OS, it's kind of like a ball of edges. Like the whole thing is made of edge cases. There's there's not really um just one way to, you know, quickly ship it. It's it's in some ways like the anti-YC company. It's a thing you can't build

in like a couple months and launch. It does take months and months and years and years to develop it.

Um early on we had a lot of amazing customers. I mean we um you know early on powered off for folks like Verscell and Web Flow and Carta and you know kind of the previous era of of cloud SAS we all know about um it's just what we've seen with the AI stuff is it it grows faster um the companies are adopted sooner within the enterprise

and all this AI functionality it's actually scrutinized by security IT people you know a lot more a lot more heavily like the IT people say no way we can use your AI unless it fits these you know security policies and so despite being started in the pre-AII era, work OS is actually kind of perfectly positioned to be in we are an AI business today without having been started uh started that way.

Yeah. How have you how have you processed the overall SAS apocalypse narrative or or just vibe coding in general? In many ways, if uh work OS can can kind of I feel like deliver kind of the dream of vibe coding, which is like maybe there's some uh some specific functionality you want to build. you want to be able to sell it into the enterprise, but pre-work OS maybe that wasn't uh that wouldn't have been possible because you have all these edge cases that that enterprises are going to care about. But how have you processed the entire narrative?

Yeah, when people are vibe coding stuff, uh you know, you typically don't want to vibe code your security part of your application. And you you might vibe code the features of the UI like like the AI code gen is so good for doing UI engineering but when it comes to stuff like authentications or permissions or things around compliance or auditing that's maybe not the place you want to apply AI and and we've seen that actually from uh a lot of our customers including our customers being the AI labs that are building the models to do this stuff they're even using using work OS um what we've seen from a lot of other businesses is there's no time to build it inhouse so in the previous era you might have had you like a few years to figure out enterprise. If you go back and look at like Dropbox or something, you know, they they built for many many years before they did enterprise. Today, what's happening is these AI companies, you know, powered by by the functionality, they go after enterprise pretty much immediately. Like within the first year, they have to go up market. And so there's no time to build it. They just turn to us and we ship it for them.

So, so I mean truly how low is the bar? Like if I'm if I'm in YC and I vibe code a piece of software that's like MVP but it works like Is is work OS like accessible to the point where it's self-s serve free for like how how low is the bar?

Absolutely. So we have an amazing free tier. It's free up to 1 million users.

Wow, that's a lot.

So even maybe you get a million users when you're in YC, but past that, you know, as you keep growing, what we charge for is the enterprise features. And really we try to align our pricing model with you as a customer. As you go close enterprise deals, you pay work OS. It's it's kind of like Stripe, you know, you pay Stripe money when you go, you know, make money yourself. Um, but it's so easy to use. We have people that integrate, you know, work OS in an hour or two.

They're out there selling enterprise essentially as soon as they have demand. And actually, just last month, we shipped a new capability that's even faster to integrate because it uses AI.

So AI is actually accelerating our customer base. It's also accelerating how fast you can adopt and use use our functionality. You essentially just run a command, it installs work OS

and then KPI around that in terms of like integration timelines like it seems like they're getting shorter but what are we talking about like days of developer time, weeks?

If you run our CLI installer which uses AI to install, it takes roughly 7 to 8 minutes. So, it's super fast and I've been doing this trick uh you know whenever I do like a sales call with a with a customer that's interested in using work OS essentially kick off the call and say hey go try this you know just run it in your terminal in the background we'll come back to it after I click around the dashboard a little bit

and essentially you have a PC that's ready to go you know in the past

we we would still integrate fast you know but we would have to talk to their engineering team we get on the road map we we do an architecture call we have a amazing team of solutions engineers and developer success that helps plug stuff But I think what we're finding is AI is this accelerant not just in terms of market adoption but just making software easier to use and integrate. We even have people that migrate using AI. So they might using a different solution or having a homegrown thing

you know you plug cloud or codeex into it and just rip through it. It's it's really wild. Yeah.

Uh what now is the job finished or or

job's not done?

Absolutely not done. Uh in in some ways it's kind of like a new moment for the company. I I told our staff at the beginning of this year, you know, um if I was to start work OS today, what I would essentially build is work OS for AI and specifically for AI agents. So that's what we're building going forward. You know, if you think about agents in the world, a lot of people talk about agents in different ways. Really, what they're doing is displacing people doing work or or enabling people to do more. You know, uh I think Ivan from from Notion has called agents the you're you're a manager of infinite minds. the ability to go and control and kind of adapt all these different systems to do work for you. The problem with agents is if you're spawning all these things, these workers to go do things for you, they essentially need permissions. They need access to data. And an agent isn't useful if you can't connect it to all your different stuff. And you can't do that securely. Last thing you want is an agent, you know, running wild. I think there was a was a story on Twitter a week or two ago of um an agent an openclaw instance going rogue and deleting a bunch of email. You guys remember that?

Amazon. It was like Amazon also had I think some issues like head of alignment or something. Yeah,

it was a really wild look.

So, you know, you definitely don't want that for your personal account, but it's completely disastrous if you're doing that internally to your systems or god forbid it's doing it to your customers. And so, this problem around what can agents do? They're extremely powerful, but we essentially need to give them different types of permissions and guard rails and identity on top of it. And so that's that's a new thing that we've been building at work OS with some partners building this new essentially identity fabric is what we're calling it that sits across everything and allows people building agents to have the connectivity but also the security and trust that uh is demanded by their customers and we hope with that

it will act as an accelerant more into the enterprise. It'll help more companies building AI do it in a way that's safe.

Amazing. Uh last question for me um how's the role of you said like integration engineer it sounded like almost forward deployed engineer. How is that role changing at work OS now?

Well, everything at work OS is using AI. Our customers are using AI. We're using it every single role. We have sales reps building stuff with cloud code. You know, our finance team doing stuff. We have hackathons going. And so, it's definitely impacting the people that are working with customers every day in that way. Um, I think the magic of cloud code and and this for deployed engineer is it essentially turns one person into a whole team. So it kind of mimics having you know if you go sell product to like a bank like Deutsch Bank your giant company like Microsoft you would be able to afford having like 10 or 15 engineers go sit in their office and write code literally like post up with your laptop and like build stuff for them that that's the the original you know solutions engineer for deployed engineer. What AI lets people do today is essentially have that same experience but have a tiny company do it you know like work OS. It essentially lets us be that level of consultative, you know, impactful uh work in your organization. The first step when we run our AI installer for customers, what it's actually doing behind the scenes is it's looking at your codebase and building a plan. It's doing an architecture review by analyzing your structure and providing the best, you know, course of action going forward, the best recommendation. And that I think we're just scratching the surface on that. I mean, that's like

it's so early. It's so so early in terms of all this. Um, so at the end of the day, it just makes people, you know, integrate faster, go to market sooner, ship faster, and just just grow up market sooner. We we talk about work OS being the uh help making your product enterprise ready.

It's really an API that unlocks revenue. It expands your TAM as an organization. And when these companies go through that transition moment, say they just start getting product market fit and expanding, the last thing they want to be doing is is slowed down by the lack of these enterprise features when they have a big fish on the line. Yeah. You know, and and what works does it turns that on almost immediately. So if it's seven or eight minutes today, the big fish company of San Francisco.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. It's like a fishing line. It's like we'll help you get it to vote faster. Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

Awesome. Great. Great to get the update. Congratulations to the whole team

and we'll talk again. Great to see you guys. Take care.

Bye.

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