- Sycamore raised $65 million in seed funding led by Coatue and Lightspeed.
- Founder Sri Viswanath is a former Coatue investor and ex-CTO of Atlassian.
- Sycamore builds an operating system for autonomous enterprise AI agents.
- Angels include Bob McGrew (ex-OpenAI), Lip-Bu Tan (Intel CEO), and Ali Ghodsi (Databricks CEO).
$65 Million Before a Public Product — and Nobody Blinked
Sycamore’s seed round is one of the largest of 2026 so far. Coatue and Lightspeed co-led the round, with Abstract Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, 8VC, Fellows Fund, and E14 Fund also participating. The angel list reads like a tech CEO directory: Bob McGrew (former OpenAI chief scientist), Lip-Bu Tan (Intel CEO), Ali Ghodsi (Databricks CEO), Frederic Kerrest (Okta co-founder), Soham Mazumdar (Rubrik co-founder), and Mike Knoop (Zapier co-founder).
“Sri is one of the few founders who has built enterprise platforms at true global scale,” said Raviraj Jain, Partner at Lightspeed. Thomas Laffont, Coatue co-founder, called Sycamore a “BFI — Big F Idea” — a market that expands the entire category.
A Crowded Market With a Differentiated Pitch
Viswanath spent two decades building enterprise platforms at Sun Microsystems, VMware, Groupon, and Atlassian, where he led the cloud transformation as CTO. His time as a Coatue investor gave him a front-row seat to the enterprise AI adoption wave — and the infrastructure gaps holding it back. “Most tools take existing workflows and layer agents on top,” he told TechCrunch. “Sycamore starts with the problem itself and designs the right solution from scratch.”
The competition is formidable. OpenAI-backed Isara raised $94 million last week. Airia closed $100 million in September, Port another $100 million in December. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft Azure, and AWS all want to own the enterprise agent layer. But Sycamore is betting that none of them are solving the trust and governance problem — the gap between what agents can do in a demo and what enterprises will actually deploy in production. The company says it is already working with Fortune 500 clients across financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing, though it declined to name them.
