AI startup with heavy Duke ties eyes North Carolina for growth
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Jake Stauch, left, and Tatiana Birgisson help lead the AI startup Serval as a married couple. Photo: Courtesy of Serval.
In a sea of fast-growing AI startups in San Francisco, one of them has a particular heavy Blue Devil influence at the top.
Why it matters: Serval, whose AI-assisted IT support software is valued at $1 billion, is led by the married couple Tatiana Birgisson and Jake Stauch, who met at Duke more than a decade ago and both founded Durham-based startups as undergrads.
- Birgisson created the Mati Energy drink brand and Stauch founded the brain-controlled video game company NeuroPlus.
Driving the news: After leaving their own startups, Stauch and Birgisson worked at other tech companies for several years, until Stauch co-founded Serval in 2024.
- Many of the company's earliest employees were Duke alumni.
What it does: Serval's heady valuation comes from its attempt to rival the giant software company ServiceNow by being more agile with AI. It's raised $127 million from investors.
- Serval's software helps companies automate their IT support systems, automating everything from simple help desk requests like resetting passwords to more complex things like onboarding new employees.
- The platform also helps companies build new automations by allowing them to describe their problem in natural language, a process informally known as "vibe coding."
State of play: Serval has been growing quickly over the past year, growing from 20 employees to 200 over the past year.
- Stauch said the company hopes to add another 100 employees over the next six to 12 months, especially in what it is calling automation engineering roles.
- Essentially, Stauch said, these would-be employees would embed with a large company's IT, HR, legal and finance departments to find ways to automate tasks or help identify problems they could fix.
- "We feel like customer insight increasingly becomes the moat," he said. "Everyone has access to the same [AI] tools … so we have to know things about our customers that no one else knows."
What they're saying: Serval currently has offices in San Francisco and New York, but it plans to open offices in additional cities. One is already planned in Austin, but the Triangle is on the list for consideration, Stauch and Birgisson said.
- "One of the reasons why we're looking in the Triangle" for our automation engineering roles is there's "obviously a ton of young talent coming out of the universities," he said. "Young folks that I think would plug really well into this function. And they could have a [computer science] degree, they might not, but they … understand how to use AI in their daily lives."