The VC Veteran Building a Massive Brain for the Modern Office

A former partner at Coatue just landed a monster $65 million seed round to change how big companies use AI. Sri Viswanath is the name behind the new startup, Sycamore. While most seed rounds are much smaller, Viswanath managed to pull in massive interest from heavy hitters like Coatue and Lightspeed. He also got a long list of famous tech names to open their wallets, including former OpenAI chief scientist Bob McGrew and Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi. This isn’t just another startup run by kids in a garage. Viswanath has decades of experience leading engineering teams at places like Sun Microsystems, VMware, and Atlassian.

Investors were eager to back Sycamore for a few big reasons. First, the founder knows exactly how to build tech that works at a global scale. At Atlassian, he led an engineering team of over 7,000 people. He understands the plumbing of big corporations better than almost anyone else in the valley. He left his comfy role as a venture capitalist because he saw a huge gap in the market that he knew he could fill. He says this round came together so quickly because of the deep relationships he built over twenty years in the industry.

Sycamore isn’t just building a simple chatbot. Viswanath is aiming for something much bigger: an orchestration layer for AI agents. Most tools today just try to layer AI on top of existing workflows. Sycamore does the opposite. They start with a problem and then design the right solution from the ground up. This might involve building a custom agent, setting up back-end infrastructure, or integrating data from different sources. The goal is to create an AI that can handle everything from writing code to managing complex server setups without needing a human to hold its hand every step of the way.

Even with $65 million in the bank, Sycamore faces a crowded room. The market for enterprise AI agents is absolutely packed. You have tiny startups like Maisa AI and larger ones like Isara, which just raised $94 million. Then you have the mid-sized companies in growth mode like Airia and Port. If that wasn’t enough, the giants are also coming. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Amazon all want to own the platform that businesses use to run their AI. They all have their own versions of “agent clouds” and “foundries” that they are pushing on their existing customers.

Viswanath knows he is climbing a steep hill, but he believes his deep-tech approach is the winner. He says Sycamore has already gained traction with some massive enterprise customers, though he isn’t ready to name them publicly yet. The company is using the new cash to hire the best engineers and build out its core technology. The goal is to become the invisible brain that runs the modern office. If he pulls this off, Sycamore won’t just be another AI company. It will be the foundation that every other corporate AI is built on.

The stakes are high because every big business is currently scrambling to figure out how to use AI without breaking their existing systems. They need someone they can trust to handle the security and orchestration of these new tools. With his background at Atlassian and Sun, Viswanath is betting that he is that person. He isn’t interested in flashy demos or hype. He is building the boring, essential infrastructure that makes the future of work actually happen.