Serval raises $150M to rip out ServiceNow — enterprise AI workflow platform goes on offense

let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers databases and more while Railway automatically SC takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Our next guest is here from Serville, the co-founder and CEO, Jake Sto. Welcome to the show. How you doing?

I'm great. How are you? Great to be here. Great to see you. Congratulations on the new round. How have you been since you came on? You came on my birthday last year.

I was it your birthday? That's great.

I I am great. I am horseed today. I've been talking a lot as part of this announcement.

That's what happens. Uh take us through it. How much did you raise? I want to hit the gong.

Hit the gong.

Let's do it. 150 million out of three.

What unlock? What unlocked what unlocked the new round besides uh Kevin Coup on your team?

Oh, Kevin's a beast.

Kevin is part of a whole cast of characters that made it possible. So, uh a lot of traction with large enterprises, companies like Fox, Live Nation, WVP doing massive transformations, adopting Serbal, ripping out legacy platforms.

Mhm.

Bad day to be a legacy platform. Absolutely. Absolute nightmare situation. checking the news this morning as a legacy platform and just seeing that you guys have a bunch of fresh capital.

Yeah, I saw.

Yeah. Yeah. Service Now stock price is having a a rough day.

How's it How's it actually doing? I'm kidding. Okay. Only down. It's only down 26%.

Okay.

Okay.

We'll do that next time.

That is crazy. Um what is the uh what is the go-to pitch for a large enterprise? Is it come in we'll do everything? Is it bring us in as a point solution for one specific use case? Like how narrow are CIOS, Fortune 500 CEOs thinking when they come to you when in that first discussion versus how broad do you want to go like what's the right size of the prize?

It's it's a broad enterprise automation platform. So we can start narrow but honestly people come to us and they actually want to rip out their existing system of record. They want to rip out their enterprise service management platform. We give them a path to do that. We're the first to give them a path off of tools like Service Now

in over a decade.

And so that's where most customers want to start. Now that might take some time. So we can plug in as this enterprise automation layer on day one while we migrate the system record over time.

What uh what what do you say to someone who's like I don't like my existing provider. You might be better, but I'm worried that you're going to turn in to the previous legacy provider in a couple years. And then yes, I I maybe have it good for a couple years, but then I'm back to headache world.

Yeah, it's uh it's something I get asked about a lot. I was actually at a CIO meeting this morning and they asked me that exact question. I think it starts with talent. Um the first leading indicator of how a company's going to perform are the kinds of people you bring in.

And by focusing on keeping that talent density really, really high,

that's how we can avoid becoming the thing that we set out to destroy. How front and center is cyber security in these discussions today, this week, this month versus a year ago, five years ago, something like that.

It's always been front and center for our customers because Serbal ends up getting access to so many critical things.

Yeah.

So, it hasn't really changed how our customers evaluate us. They always looked at us through a very critical lens. Luckily, our focus on these deterministic workflows that are audited, that are codebased, that have approval and and permission checks has always been an advantage for us. That's becoming even more important to our customers today. Uh we have doubled down like others on security internally. We recently acquired a cyber security company and brought in the leader there as our head of security. So, we're really passionate about locking down the platform because our customers rely on this for so many mission critical workloads. What if you run into a CIO who's like a hipster and they're like, "I just like old PHP. I just want to do everything in old PHP." You say, "Too bad. You got to use the latest and greatest, the secure thing."

Yeah. I don't know if there's going to be a market for artal software.

I I think that might actually completely die off. You You get the people with the wired headphones, the vinyl records. I I think that the old PHP might just truly be uh forgotten forever. And uh

it'll be like pottery. It'll be like a really nice skill that you learn in a class. Yes. On weekends as a hobby.

Yes. Yes. Yes. I agree. I agree.

Uh how personal is com is is competing in this market for you? The way that you talk about service now, it seems it seems like very personal.

Gloves off.

I think you have to know who you're competing with and you have to have fun with the competition. So, it's not personal. It's just we're trying to build uh a bigger company and that starts with what we've done, which is build a better product. But now we've got a lot to do to execute on that and and turn it into a much bigger company.

Well, you've certainly done that.

You're playing with your food a little bit, but I love it. Very cool.

That's what a servo cat does.

Yeah, that's that was I was aiming for something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Well, congratulations on the funding round. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Yeah, great stuff, Jake. We'll see. We'll see you back here soon.

We'll talk to you soon, Jake. Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye.

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