SIERRA Ventures

Attention Small Business Owners Affected by Bench Accounting Closure 😔 We're saddened to hear the news about Bench.co closing its doors. We understand how unsettling this news must be. Losing a trusted accounting partner, especially as the year-end approaches, can feel overwhelming and uncertain. At Zeni, we know how critical it is to have dependable support for your business's finances. That's why we're here to help with a special transition package! 🤝 ✅ Free account migration: We’ll transfer your historical data from Bench to Zeni ✅ Dedicated onboarding specialist: A Zeni expert will be your personal guide, answering questions and ensuring a seamless transition tailored to your needs ✅ Exclusive discount: Get 50% off your first 3 months with Zeni To get started, fill out the form here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gpyX6pAT P.S. Know a fellow business owner affected by the Bench Accounting closure? Share this post with them—because no one should face year-end bookkeeping stress alone. #BenchClosure #SmallBusinessAccounting #BookkeepingHelp

We hope everyone is having a great holiday season and wish you all a prosperous 2025 from the SIERRA Ventures team and our favorite pups.

🏆 BIG NEWS! Enable has been named a recipient of the 2024 Top Tech Startup award, presented by Supply & Demand Chain Executive and Food Logistics! We're honored to be recognized on this prestigious list showcasing the top #startups making a difference in the #supplychain. A sincere THANK YOU to all of our incredible Enablees, customers, and investors who made this possible! We couldn't have done it without your support. 🙏 Here's to reaching even greater heights of innovation and achievement in 2025! Learn more: https://lnkd.in/erbCBcnX

I am excited to announce that Cimulate, Inc. raised $28 million in Series A funding led by Spark Capital with participation from our Seed stage investors SIERRA Ventures and Pillar VC, with additional participation from LFX Venture Partners and Commerce Ventures. Vivek Farias and I started this journey in 2023, and it has been an incredibly fun and rewarding ride. When you see the technology and product, the team, and the market timing all come together in the course of a year, along with a great group of early customers and investors, it is hard not be excited about the road ahead. This is a market Vivek and I know well. Today's commerce ecosystem is at a crossroads, with traditional product discovery technologies obsolete as they fail to satisfy consumer demands and business needs. The Cimulate platform powered by CustomerGPT is the LLM-based solution is ready to change the customer experience, starting with search. I didn’t think I would be back in the commerce search market, but now is definitely the time to be here. Looking forward to an exciting year ahead and hope to see many of you at @NRF next month. Reach out if you are going to be there! (Cimulate is at Booth 1141) Links to more info in the first comment below.

Announcing SIERRA Ventures’ Investment in Cimulate: Redefining Commerce with AI After leading their $5M Seed round in Fall 2023, we’re thrilled to announce Cimulate's $28M Series A led by Spark Capital. Other investors include Pillar VC, LFX Venture Partners, and Commerce Ventures. Cimulate is led by visionary founders who bring unparalleled expertise to the table. Vivek Farias, an MIT professor and renowned reinforcement learning expert, drives groundbreaking AI innovation. John Andrews is a seasoned retail technology leader with experience at Endeca, Oracle, and Nike. Together, they are reshaping the future of commerce. At the heart of Cimulate’s innovation is the Commerce Experience Server, powered by CustomerGPT. This server reinvents commerce search with blazing-fast, context-aware solutions that far surpass the limitations of legacy technologies. Just as OpenAI revolutionized text processing, Cimulate is transforming commerce. We’re proud to partner with them on this industry-defining journey. More from Tim Guleri on our investment: https://lnkd.in/g56kmSrQ Link to the press release and the exclusive from Axios in the first comment.

"The migration to Astro Cloud resulted in a 40% reduction in maintenance overhead, enabling the team to redirect resources toward innovation. Our decision to move to Astro Cloud wasn’t just about solving immediate challenges - it was about future-proofing our operations and ensuring that we could scale effortlessly while maintaining operational excellence." - Ankush Gautam, Data Engineering and Platform Leader, DataStax Learn how DataStax has doubled down on Astro for its data orchestration and scalability needs, helping them stay ahead in the ⚡-fast world of #GenAI and enterprise data solutions. https://lnkd.in/gqj-jadv

🏆 BIG NEWS! Enable has been named a recipient of the 2024 Top Tech Startup award, presented by Supply & Demand Chain Executive and Food Logistics! We're honored to be recognized on this prestigious list showcasing the top #startups making a difference in the #supplychain. A sincere THANK YOU to all of our incredible Enablees, customers, and investors who made this possible! We couldn't have done it without your support. 🙏 Here's to reaching even greater heights of innovation and achievement in 2025! Learn more: https://lnkd.in/erbCBcnX

I recently worked with a founder on an early-stage GTM hire and was reminded of this conversation with Carol Carpenter. Her advice was something many founders need to hear when hiring. Carol is incredible. VP Marketing at Google Cloud, CMO at VMware, CMO at Unity, and before all that, she came in to be the CEO at one of SIERRA Ventures' portcos, ElasticBox, helping it get acquired by Lumen Technologies. Often, we put too much importance on logos on a resume. "Wow, they were VP of Marketing at <insert hypergrowth startup>!" But we need to ask, as Carol pointed out, are they a great jockey or on a great horse? Are they truly great marketing leaders who significantly helped grow that startup, or were they at a hypergrowth startup that would blast off no matter what? Scanning resumes for logos is easy, and we all do it at the top of the funnel. But when it comes down to making the offer, dig deep into what the candidate has done, how they built and tracked their programs, what type of budget they need, do they thrive at doing more with less, when they will hire, and whether they can recruit great talent. Full interview: https://lnkd.in/gZFfjNUA

This year, our TeamOhana dinners have been more than just meals—they've been transformative conversations about innovation, efficiency, and growth. From San Francisco to New York, Seattle to back again in SF, we've had the privilege of breaking bread with some of the industry's most forward-thinking CFOs and finance leaders. Last week, we wrapped up an incredible year of TeamOhana dinners with an unforgettable evening at Osito in San Francisco. 🍽️✨ This dinner brought together some of the Bay Area's most dynamic finance leaders, and I'm still buzzing from our incredible conversations. A big thank you to Shubha Chandramouli from Cedar, Atishay Sinha from MetricStream, Noah Barr from Ambient.ai, Yatin Mody from Postman, Kenny Tran from Scale AI, Anne Berry from IPSY, Vera Neinken from Instawork, Nick Capparelli, CFA from Crusoe, Andry Haryanto from Vida Health and Matt Ghering from Motive who took time from their busy schedules to join us. A special shout-out to Somrat Niyogi and Sarah Tierney Niyogi from Recall Capital, Vignesh Ravikumar from SIERRA Ventures, and Michael Safro from Stifel Bank, who continue to support these intimate gatherings. These dinners are about so much more than networking. You're helping create spaces where real connections happen. In a world of endless Zoom calls and LinkedIn messages, there's something magical about sitting around a table, breaking bread, and diving deep into conversations about innovation, scaling, and the future of finance. Each story shared, and each challenge discussed reminds me why I love what we do at TeamOhana. To the finance leaders who walked into Osito that night, your openness, willingness to share, and drive to push beyond the status quo is what make our community so incredible. Here's to meaningful connections, great food, and the incredible journey ahead! 🚀

The debate between public cloud adoption and on-premises infrastructure is more relevant than ever. Dmitry Shevrin's latest blog post explores the motivations behind cloud repatriation and the factors that support on-prem Kubernetes. Read more about why organizations are reevaluating their cloud strategies, dive into the debate between cloud and on-prem, and see how Kubernetes bridges the two. Check out Dmitry’s insights here 👉 https://lnkd.in/dR5dj9gQ