Sierra Is Acquiring Takeoff

Since the beginning of this year, Takeoff has gone from $0 in ARR to nearly 8 figures of revenue as of earlier this month. We’re energized to have the opportunity to accelerate and scale our product with Sierra’s partnership and trust around the world. Our teams together are building a new platform called Horizon.

We’ve spent the last 14 months building Takeoff into a long-horizon agent runtime that enables agents to operate like humans but scale like software. When Bret, Clay, and I first sat down a few weeks ago, I shared the core thesis from my fundraising memo:

In today’s market, the inference API in isolation is a commodity, and that the true enterprise winner in AI will be the company that:

Builds end-to-end solutions deeply specific to each industry; and

Gets paid directly as a function of the outcomes those solutions produce.

I told Bret how our obsessive focus on revenue-aligned outcomes led us to several seven figure contracts in a matter of months. Across five industries spanning lending to healthcare, Takeoff agents have beaten competing agents in head-to-head tests and consistently outperformed the processes, systems, and people in place before them. I’d made this pitch hundreds of times coming out of raising our last funding round, and was ready for a reaction of cautious skepticism. Bret’s reaction caught me off guard:

“We agree.”

“Agree? On what!”

“All of it.”

Over many conversations with Bret and Clay, it became clear that we both believed that fully autonomous agents would perform human-level work at software scale. We believed the largest businesses in AI would be built around outcomes, not just inference. And we believed long-horizon agents would change the physics of some of the largest industries in the world. Sierra was coming at the same north star from a different starting point, but it was clear both companies’ vectors were pointed in the same direction.

Takeoff was approaching a near 8-figure run rate with a 3 person team. The advice for an AI startup growing at our pace is to hire out a sales team, raise again, and keep going. We had capital, customers, and great traction. What Bret, Clay, and Sierra offered us was an opportunity to accelerate our shared vision and simultaneously build it at a grander scale.

How we build and deploy world-class agents

There has been a tendency in the industry lately to treat any company that looks like a services business as a failure of abstraction. If the customer needs help, they say “the product isn’t self-serve”. If a deployed engineer needs to understand the customer’s operation, they say “the platform isn’t horizontal enough.”

At Takeoff, the market has taught us that this does not apply to the new shape of software (agents). When agents can perform the job end to end, it is critical to understand the customer’s operation.

You cannot design a loan officer agent without understanding how great loan officers build trust, resolve uncertainty, why borrowers disappear, which question should come first, and predict what a borrower might be anxious about. You cannot design a patient onboarding agent by connecting a frontier model to an EHR and uploading an SOP. You need to understand the patient, the provider, the payer, the incentives between them, and the hundred small reasons a referral fails to become an appointment.

We’ve built a culture and core belief that building great customer-facing agents requires not just a strong technical understanding of how AI models and tools work, but also requires exercising a degree of creativity to understand the unique aspects of ambiguity and complex systems in real world interactions. No eval or RL environment today can fully simulate the dynamism of customers.

Takeoff and Sierra are both market expansionary as well as category creative. Agents that operate like humans but scale like software turns a scarce resource abundant. In a market like that, a great product without a world-class deployment machine loses to a mediocre product with an amazing deployment team. We believe Takeoff and Sierra together have both.

With Sierra’s resources, scale, and partnerships, we have achieved a different kind of takeoff. The reception to last week’s Horizon announcement has been exceptional. We’re excited to continue working with our existing customers and bring revenue-generating, long-horizon agents to the rest of the world.

It’s an incredibly exciting time to be building complex agents driving top line for our customers. If this mission sounds exciting to you, reach out, we’re hiring across all functions.

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