Serval Raises $150M at $3B Valuation, Targets ServiceNow
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Serval, a startup that sells itself as a replacement for ServiceNow, has raised $150 million in a Series C at a $3 billion post-money valuation. It is the company's third round in 12 months. Total funding now stands at $277 million, Fortune reported on October 29, 2026.
Sequoia led the round, as it did the $75 million Series B in December that valued Serval at $1 billion. Elad Gil, Evantic, First Round, General Catalyst and Redpoint returned. Conviction and Headline joined.
Serval had about 20 employees in January and has about 200 now. CEO and co-founder Jake Stauch expects at least 700 by the end of next year.
Picking a fight
"It was just a fight that we decided to pick," Stauch told Fortune. Serval's ads name ServiceNow, and its sales pitch is built around replacing it. Stauch and co-founder Alex McLeod, the chief technology officer, met at the security-camera company Verkada. They listed the biggest enterprise software companies and asked which AI could knock over. ServiceNow was "two or three" on that list, Stauch said.
Their bet is that ServiceNow is a workflow automation company built on drag-and-drop tools and custom configuration, and that AI-written code makes that cheap.
One customer listed on Serval's website is WPP. The company says two Fortune 20 companies converted in the last six months, but it will not name them. It says annual recurring revenue has doubled every quarter since the Series B and gives no dollar figures.
Serval builds automations in an agent called Catalyst. It tests them in a separate environment with branching, access controls and audit logs, then publishes them to a second agent that employees use.
Anas Biad, the Sequoia partner on the deal, said Serval is "on a trajectory to be the fastest-growing top-down Enterprise system-of-record company in history." Stauch called the back-to-back raises "opportunistic" and said the company has years of runway in the bank.
Biad also rejected the criticism that Serval has no IP of its own, unlike an incumbent such as ServiceNow, which has 20 years of experience advising IT departments. "Serval has exceptional IP in the platform and system of record it has built, which customers are adopting at an incredible pace," he said.
ServiceNow answers
Sean Regan, general manager of Flow by ServiceNow, said every AI agent needs trusted data, workflows and governance to act on, and that this cannot be easily replicated. He pointed to Flow, a standalone AI service desk launched on October 1. It can be running in a day, and its published price is $2 per conversation.
Regan also cited ServiceNow's third-quarter results, released Wednesday: agentic AI consumption in production up more than 13 times year over year, a 98% renewal rate, AI ITSM deal volume up nearly 80% and a 2026 AI annual contract value target raised to $1.7 billion from $1.5 billion.
ServiceNow reported third-quarter revenue of $4.11 billion on Wednesday, ahead of estimates. Earnings of $1 a share missed the $1.02 analysts expected. Its fourth-quarter revenue guidance of $4.25 billion to $4.26 billion fell short of the $4.36 billion consensus. ServiceNow shares were down more than 26% in Thursday trading.
Serval is also launching a services arm, ProServal. It plans to hire more than 100 "Automation Engineers" over the next year, about half of them straight out of college. They will get four weeks of training and then be embedded inside customers to rebuild their workflows.
Source: Fortune