The Idea:

In 2024, Jake Stauch and Alex McLeod had spent nearly five years at Verkada, the security camera company. Stauch, a Duke dropout from South Carolina, had already made Forbes 30 Under 30 for NeuroPlus, his startup building brainwave-controlled games for kids with ADHD. McLeod was an engineer from Melbourne.

At Verkada, they kept hearing the same thing from IT leaders: automate our help desk. Password resets, software access, onboarding. Thousands of tickets a week, all handled by hand.

So they made a list of the biggest enterprise software companies ever built and asked which ones AI could knock over. ServiceNow, worth around $150B, was two or three on that list.

Their bet: strip away the branding and ServiceNow is a workflow automation company built on drag-and-drop tools and expensive custom configuration. If AI could write that code for pennies, the whole category was up for grabs.

Stauch’s theory came from the prison yard. On day one, find the biggest guy and take him on. “It was just a fight that we decided to pick.”

This was the beginning of Serval.

The Execution:

• April 2024: Stauch and McLeod found Serval in San Francisco and raise roughly $5M in early backing, putting total funding at $52M after the Series A.
• 2025: The product lets IT teams describe a workflow in plain English and turns it into auditable code. Customers like Perplexity automate 50%+ of IT tickets.
• October 2025: Redpoint leads a $47M Series A, with First Round, General Catalyst and Bessemer joining, at a $232M valuation.
• December 2025: Under three months later, Sequoia pre-empts a $75M Series B at a $1B valuation. Revenue grew 500% between August and December.
• February 2026: The asterisk. The Wall Street Journal reveals Sequoia had closed a private deal valuing Serval at under $400M just days before the unicorn headline, making Serval the poster child for a valuation-juicing tactic sweeping AI.
• October 1, 2026: The giant swings back. ServiceNow launches Flow, a standalone AI service desk that deploys in a day at $2 per conversation, bought with a credit card.
• October 29, 2026: Sequoia leads a third straight round, a $150M Series C at $3B, taking total funding to $277M. ARR has doubled every quarter since the Series B and two Fortune 20 companies have signed. The same week, ServiceNow misses on earnings and guides below consensus.
• Today: Serval has grown from about 20 staff in January to around 200, and its Head of Talent says it plans to hire 500+ in the next year. Sequoia calls it on track to be the fastest-growing top-down enterprise system of record ever.

The lesson?

Most founders pick a problem and hope it turns into a big company. Stauch and McLeod picked the big company first, then worked backwards to the problem. Naming ServiceNow in every ad and every pitch made Serval’s ambition legible to customers and investors from day one, and Sequoia priced it accordingly. Stauch calls it a “delusional plan” that’s now coming to fruition. Pick your giant before you pick your product.