Serval

Serval is a San Francisco-based AI-native IT Service Management (ITSM) company founded in 2024 by Jake Stauch and Alex McLeod. The company combines help desk operations, access management, ticketing, asset management, and workflow automation into a unified platform designed around AI from day one. The leadership team includes Jake Stauch, Alex McLeod, and COO and Head of GTM Tatiana Birgisson, whose experience spans Verkada, Myagi, MATI Energy, OpenStore, Rippling, and McKinsey & Company. Together, they are building software aimed at reducing the operational burden placed on internal IT teams.

Serval has raised $127 million across funding rounds led by Redpoint Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Customers include Perplexity AI, Notion, Vercel, Clay, WRITER, Mercor, and Verkada. The significance extends beyond a single startup. Serval represents a broader shift toward AI-native ITSM platforms that do more than organize work. They are increasingly expected to complete it.

About Serval

Enterprise IT rarely attracts attention when everything is working. An employee receives access instantly. A laptop arrives before a first day. A security request gets approved without a chain of emails stretching across three departments. Nobody celebrates those moments. They simply expect them.

Jake Stauch and Alex McLeod spent years close to enterprise customers and saw a recurring problem hiding in plain sight. IT teams were spending valuable time handling repetitive requests while many automation tools remained difficult to configure and maintain. The result was an operational tax paid every day by organizations trying to move faster.

That observation became the foundation for Serval. Founded in April 2024 and headquartered in San Francisco, Serval is building an AI-native ITSM platform designed to automate a significant share of the operational work traditionally handled by internal IT teams. The platform spans help desk operations, access management, ticketing, onboarding, offboarding, asset management, and workflow automation across multiple departments. The company's approach is architectural rather than incremental. Instead of bolting AI onto an existing workflow system, Serval was built around AI-generated workflows from the beginning.

Why Serval Matters Right Now

Timing matters in enterprise software. Entire categories become vulnerable when a technological shift changes how work gets done. Cloud computing created infrastructure giants. Mobile computing created platform winners. Artificial intelligence is creating new opportunities across enterprise operations.

The IT Service Management market remains one of enterprise software's largest and most entrenched categories. Industry forecasts project the market will exceed $30 billion over the next decade, making it a critical layer of enterprise infrastructure. ServiceNow remains the dominant incumbent, while platforms such as Jira Service Management and Freshservice have established significant positions across the market. That makes Serval's emergence notable. Few categories with deeply embedded workflows produce meaningful challengers.

Large language models have changed the economics of workflow creation. Serval's thesis is that building automation should be as simple as describing what needs to happen. Simple ideas often sound obvious only after somebody proves they work.

The Problem Serval Is Solving

Enterprise IT teams face a familiar challenge. The most common requests are often the least strategic uses of highly skilled talent. Password resets, software approvals, access requests, user provisioning, and employee onboarding each appear small in isolation. Together, they consume enormous amounts of operational capacity.

Serval addresses this challenge through an AI-native ITSM platform built around workflow automation and AI agents. Administrators can describe processes using natural language, allowing the platform to generate structured workflows that can be reviewed, managed, and executed. Employees interact with automated support systems capable of resolving many requests without direct human involvement.

According to company-reported metrics, more than 50% of IT tickets can be resolved autonomously on day one. Customers have reported automation rates reaching 80% within 24 hours and significant reductions in ticket resolution times. For IT leaders under pressure to scale operations without endlessly adding headcount, those metrics attract attention.

Leadership and Team

Many of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies are being built by operators who spent years learning inside high-growth organizations before starting their own. Jake Stauch, Co-Founder and CEO, previously founded NeuroSpire and NeuroPlus before joining Verkada, where he ultimately became Director of Product. Alex McLeod, Co-Founder and CTO, served as Founding Engineer and later CTO at Myagi before leading engineering organizations at Verkada.

Tatiana Birgisson joined Serval in 2025 as COO and Head of GTM. Before Serval, she founded MATI Energy and held leadership positions at McKinsey & Company, OpenStore, and Rippling. The combination reflects a blend of product, engineering, operational, and go-to-market experience that is increasingly common among successful enterprise software startups.

Market Context

Serval's growth has attracted a notable investor base. The company has raised $127 million in less than two years, including a $47 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures and a $75 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital. Additional investors include General Catalyst, First Round Capital, Meritech Capital, BoxGroup, Bessemer Venture Partners, Sound Ventures, Radical Ventures, and Evantic Capital.

Investor participation alone does not validate a company. Customer adoption does. Serval's customer roster includes Perplexity AI, Notion, Vercel, Clay, WRITER, Mercor, Cribl, Bilt, Owner.com, Verkada, and Sequoia's internal IT organization. A pattern emerges across those customers. Many operate in software-intensive environments where operational speed directly affects growth. That customer concentration provides a useful signal about where AI-native ITSM platforms may gain traction first.

Serval is headquartered in San Francisco and serves technology-forward organizations across North America, placing it directly inside one of the most active enterprise AI ecosystems in the world.

Why Hiring Momentum Matters

Hiring activity often reveals more than funding announcements. Capital creates optionality. Hiring decisions reveal priorities.

Serval continues expanding across engineering, product, design, sales, marketing, deployment, and operations functions. That growth suggests customer demand is translating into organizational expansion. Sophisticated operators often watch hiring momentum closely because it can provide an early indication of product adoption, customer growth, and market pull before those trends become visible in broader market data.

Interested candidates can explore opportunities through the official Serval careers page.

What This Signals for Enterprise IT

Enterprise software is entering a period of structural change. Many systems built during the last two decades were designed primarily to track and organize work. A new generation of platforms is being designed to complete work.

Software that records tickets behaves differently from software that resolves them. Software that documents workflows behaves differently from software that generates workflows. Serval sits directly within that transition. The company is part of a broader movement toward AI-native ITSM platforms that treat automation as the foundation rather than an add-on.

The Bigger Industry Shift

Much of the public conversation around artificial intelligence focuses on models, benchmarks, and consumer applications. The larger economic impact may emerge inside enterprise operations.

AI agents, workflow intelligence systems, and AI-native enterprise software are beginning to reshape how organizations manage internal processes. The objective is not simply efficiency. It is the ability to scale operational output without scaling operational complexity at the same rate.

Serval's rapid growth reflects that demand. Organizations increasingly want software that can execute tasks, automate decisions, and reduce operational friction rather than simply documenting activity. Whether Serval becomes a category-defining company remains to be seen. What is already clear is that the market for AI-native ITSM is growing, and enterprise buyers are actively evaluating a new generation of platforms built around automation from the start.