Sycamore raises $65 million for enterprise AI agent operating system

Sycamore, a startup based in Palo Alto on the Stanford research campus, has raised $65 million in seed funding to build an "operating system for enterprise AI agents." The company was founded by Sri Vishanath, former CTO of Atlassian, who led the company from $500 million to $2.5 billion in revenue. Sycamore currently has approximately 25 employees, mostly engineers and PhDs from Stanford, and expects to reach 50 by the end of the year.

The platform allows enterprises to build, deploy, and maintain custom SaaS solutions autonomously using natural language. It features two core products: Sycamore Forge, an autonomous builder, and Sycamore Guard, a governance layer for agent trust and verification. The system is fully Kubernetes-based, runs in customer VPCs or managed cloud, and uses zero-trust security with time-based tokens for agent identity. Sycamore's engineering team operates with a human-to-agent ratio of 1:10, with each engineer managing multiple concurrent agent sessions. The company does not rely on human code review for most applications; instead, it uses review agents, evals, and video evidence of changes.

Vishanath argues that traditional SaaS is obsolete in the AI era and that enterprises need a new way to build software that compounds in value rather than decaying. He advises CTOs and CIOs to adopt a "systems thinking" approach to AI adoption rather than automating individual workflows in isolation. Sycamore spends the first six to eight weeks with new customers on "co-design" to map out their systems before building. Vishanath predicts that by 2028, engineering organizations will be flatter and smaller, with agents handling communication and coordination, reducing the need for hierarchical management layers.