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Bret Taylor’s AI startup Sierra valued at $4.5 billion in funding

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Bret Taylor, co-CEO of Salesforce, speaks at the Viva Technology Conference in Paris on June 15, 2022.

Nathan Laine | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Artificial intelligence startup Sierra, co-founded by ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, is more than quadrupling its valuation to $4.5 billion in a fresh funding round.

The San Francisco-based company, which was valued at $1 billion in January, raised $175 million in a funding round led by Greenoaks Capital. The Information reported earlier this month that Sierra was in the midst of raising capital.

Taylor is chairman of OpenAI’s board and previously ran Salesforce, alongside Marc Benioff. He was also chairman of Twitter when Elon Musk was negotiating to buy the social media company. Taylor is a longtime entrepreneur, widely credited with helping to create Google Maps. At Google, he met his Sierra co-founder Clay Bavor, who spent nearly two decades at the tech giant, leading virtual reality efforts and Google Labs.

Sierra is focused on helping enterprises like home security company ADT, Sonos, Weight Watchers and Casper personalize and implement AI agents for customer service. Taylor and Bavor unveiled the startup earlier this year.

“We think every company in the world, whether it’s a technology company or a 150-year-old company like ADT, can benefit from AI, and the technology is ready right now,” Taylor told CNBC in an interview. “We want to enable Sierra to address that market, and that means expanding internationally and to other industries.” 

ICONIQ and Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital contributed to the new funding round.

Taylor describes Sierra as “conversational AI,” and bristles at the word “chatbot,” even banning the phrase in the company’s downtown San Francisco office. Sierra is looking to create a more conversational style of interaction, Taylor said. He pointed to the ease of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and compared it to the frustrating experience of talking on the phone with an airline bot.

“When you think of chatbots, you think of those annoying, robotic things — you can feel the difference,” Taylor said, adding that Sierra is making their agents more “empathetic and conversational.”

Sierra co-founder Bret Taylor on AI agent startup: We want to make our customers successful

Sierra’s team lets each client customize the agent’s personality to its corporate brand. Clothing company Chubbies, for example, took a more sarcastic route with a younger sounding agent named Duncan Smothers. Taylor said some luxury brands are opting for a British accent with a more serious tone. 

“We really think that your conversational AI agent should be not only transactional, but a brand ambassador,” Taylor said. “It’s actually something that is a statement of your values. So do you want to be sarcastic? Do you want to use emoji? Do you want it to sound like text messaging, or do you want it to sound like a lawyer?”

Sierra uses what Bavor and Taylor describe as a “constellation” of models, with a “supervisor.” The technology uses one model to do the heavy lifting, with the expectation that it won’t be 100% reliable, but use a second model as a backup, to “check” the others and help with accuracy. The company currently relies on large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, among others. 

There’s competition in the space. Taylor’s former company, Salesforce, as well as Microsoft, in partnership with OpenAI, are exploring the AI agent space. Taylor compared Sierra to the companies that built cloud software on top of Amazon Web Services and other cloud infrastructure.

“In the cloud era, you had Shopify, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Adobe — I think the same thing will play out in AI with Sierra,” Taylor said. “We’re helping their branded customer facing agent.”

He mentioned startups like Cursor, which makes coding agents, and Harvey, which makes legal agents.

Sierra’s funding follows a flurry of major AI announcements in Silicon Valley. OpenAI raised billions of dollars at a $157 billion valuation. Perplexity is in the midst of raising a round that values the company at $9 billion, a source confirmed to CNBC. One in three venture dollars this year has gone to an AI startup, according to CB Insights. 

“When a technology wave like this happens, I think a lot of people are trying to place their bets,” Taylor said. “I don’t know which company will win, but it’s a smart investment, categorically. Clearly customer experience and customer service is a huge opportunity, and I think we are the leader in this space, and seeing a lot of demands because of that.” 

WATCH: Anthropic adds new feature that gives its models new abilities

Anthropic adds new feature that gives its models new abilities

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gold etf optimism 20 years later

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20 years of the revolutionary GLD ETF

The founder of the first gold-tracking ETF is still bullish on the commodity two decades later.

“Things are looking good for the rest of this year and for next year,” George Milling-Stanley told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week.

The State Street chief gold strategist highlighted demand from both central banks and individual investors in emerging markets, such as India and China, as major tailwinds for the precious metal.

Even the postelection pullback in gold futures and the SPDR Gold Shares ETF (GLD) hasn’t tarnished the record run this year.

Since the Nov. 5 election, “investors have gone gung-ho on risk-on assets,” Milling-Stanley said. “This is why we’ve seen the stock market go up dramatically, why we’ve seen the cryptocurrencies go up dramatically.”

But the precious metal, and in turn, the GLD ETF, are “starting to claw back some of the lost ground,” Milling-Stanley said.

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GLD chart since inception

The launch of the GLD ETF changed the game for commodity ownership when it launched 20 years ago. 

Since then, investment in gold has shifted away from jewelry and into bullion and ETFs as demand for the precious metal has jumped. Milling-Stanley describes the increased investor demand as a “huge change” to the commodity investment landscape — and to portfolio management as a whole.

Todd Sohn, ETF and technical strategist at Strategas, says GLD brought more investors into gold because of the broader access ETFs can offer.

“No matter what your end game is, GLD allowed you to add something to your portfolio besides an equity and a fixed income instrument, so you can get diversification,” said Sohn.

Since its inception, GLD is up 451%. It is up 29% in 2024. 

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Citadel’s Ken Griffin says Trump’s tariffs could lead to crony capitalism

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Ken Griffin, chief executive officer and founder of Citadel Advisors LLC, speaks during an Economic Club of New York event in New York, US, on Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024.

Yuki Iwamura | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Citadel CEO Ken Griffin issued a warning against the steep tariffs President-elect Donald Trump vowed to implement, saying crony capitalism could be a consequence.

“I am gravely concerned that the rise of tariffs puts us on a slippery slope towards crony capitalism,” the billionaire investor said Thursday at the Economic Club of New York.

The Citadel founder thinks domestic companies could enjoy a short-term benefit of having their competitors taken away. Longer term, however, it does more harm to corporate America and the economy as companies lose competitiveness and productivity.

Crony capitalism is an economic system marked by close, mutually advantageous relationships between business leaders and government officials.

“Those same companies that enjoy that momentary sugar rush of having their competitors removed from the battlefield, soon become complacent, soon take for granted their newfound economic superiority, and frankly, they become less competitive on both the world stage and less competitive at meeting the needs of the American consumer,” Griffin said at the event.

Trump made universal tariffs a core tenet of his economic campaign pitch, floating a 20% levy on all imports from all countries with a specifically harsh 60% rate for Chinese goods.

The protectionist trade policy could make production of goods more expensive and raise consumer prices, just as the world recovers from pandemic-era inflation spikes.

“Now you’re going to find the halls of Washington really filled with the special interest groups and the lobbyists as people look for continued higher and higher tariffs to keep away foreign competition, and to protect inefficient American businesses have failed to meet the needs of the American consumer,” Griffin said.

At the same event, Griffin also said that he’s not focused on taking Citadel Securities public in the foreseeable future. Citadel is a market maker founded by Griffin in 2002.

“We’re focused on building the business, on investing in our future. And we do believe that there are benefits to being private during this period of very, very rapid growth,” he said.

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Stocks making the biggest moves midday: NFLX, GOOGL, NVDA, BJ

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