IT is one of the most critical functions inside any company. Every employee depends on it, every system flows through it, and almost every operational challenge eventually becomes an IT problem. When IT slows down, everyone feels it: employees are blocked waiting on support, onboarding is painful, rolling out new tools gets bottlenecked, and entire company initiatives end up stalled.

Yet despite IT’s central role, the last decade of tooling has not truly empowered them. The powerful tools are heavy to set up and brittle to maintain; the easy-to-use tools focus on narrow use cases and deflection rather than true automation. IT teams are eager to automate and are more technical than business users. They have experimented with scripts, workflow builders, and more, but the limitations of all these tools still force them to spend the majority of their time on manual work, preventing them from focusing on higher-impact work and enabling the rest of their organizations.

Jake and Alex, the co-founders of Serval, experienced this firsthand at Verkada, where they led Product and Engineering and sold primarily to IT teams. They heard the same half-joking request countless times, and it wasn’t about Verkada’s products. They would ask customers, “What else can we build for you?” and IT leaders would reply, “Can you fix my helpdesk too?” These conversations led them to two key insights: 

1. The first was that true automation only works if it is faster to automate something forever than to do it manually once.

2. The second came from watching the few IT leaders who did take the time to build automations. They would first describe the workflow in one simple sentence, then reveal a sprawling tree of branches, nodes, conditions, and edge cases. Jake and Alex wondered: what if you could actually build the entire automation the same way you describe it? What if one simple sentence truly was enough?

These insights were not possible to execute on in the past. Prior generations of AI were not strong enough to make it work, which meant IT teams continued working through manual tasks. That has now changed. With modern LLMs, code generation, and reasoning capabilities, it is finally possible to build a platform where “automate forever” is faster than “fix once.”

Serval is built precisely to deliver on this, and the team is not stopping there. They are using this moment not only to build a system of automation, but to rethink the entire ITSM system of record. As our own Sequoia IT leader, Leon, shared when they chose to become a Serval customer: “Serval is not AI for ITSM – it is ITSM built from AI.”

At the heart of the platform is an AI automation engine that lets teams go from a simple sentence to a deployment-ready automation. IT can describe workflows in natural language, then refine them further – either in natural language or all the way down to code when needed. This combination of being simple enough for anyone to use, yet deep enough for the most advanced IT builders, has resonated strongly with customers. The workflows are fully explainable and traceable, with all necessary permissions included, giving IT teams complete visibility and control and eliminating hallucination risk.

While their automation engine integrates with existing systems of records, Serval has also built a full-fledged ITSM platform, including a ticketing system, an access management product, an asset management solution, and more. Serval is both the system of engagement and the system of record. This gives IT a single place to build and orchestrate automations, enforce security and compliance, and capture the data that compounds their automation over time.

Customer feedback has been exceptional. We consistently heard how easy Serval is to use, yet how powerful, traceable, and trustworthy its automations are in practice. IT leaders described day-to-day operations being transformed – automation percentages rising every week, employee satisfaction increasing, and IT teams finally having the bandwidth to tackle projects that had been stuck on the back burner for years.

What was also exceptional, and, to be perfectly honest, not something we expected to hear at this stage: 

1. Many customers have already fully ripped and replaced incumbent ITSM tools and now use Serval as their system of record.

2. Automation quickly spread beyond IT into HR, Finance, Legal, Engineering, Security, and more. In some cases, companies have churned off dedicated software vendors for some departments because they rebuilt their workflows directly in Serval.

At Sequoia, the last time we heard such customer feedback that supports the thesis of IT system of record empowering horizontal enterprise automation was 16 years ago, when we partnered with ServiceNow. That is why we were so eager to partner with Serval and preempt their Series B round.

The market thesis is one half of the story. The other half is the team. References for Jake and Alex – from managers, direct reports, and peers – were glowing. Even more importantly, those references aligned perfectly with the evidence we heard from customers and what we’ve observed in talent flows. Strong talent from R&D to GTM is choosing to join Serval, whether or not they have worked with the founders before. The talent density and “potential energy” forming around the company are impressive and represent one of the strongest leading indicators we look for.

Empowering IT teams is an elegant and scalable way to bring AI automation to the enterprise. We are excited to partner with Jake, Alex, and the team at Serval on this journey.