Photo via First Round Capital
Serval's pitch is coding agents for IT departments, not engineering teams. Jake Stauch, Co-founder and CEO of Serval, told No Priors that he found the category by asking enterprise customers at his previous company, Verkada, what they spent the most on and hated most — "ServiceNow would top a lot of those lists."
"We love this idea of coding agents for the rest of us... IT actually wants to build stuff. For most of the world, they don't have an engineering department, they have an IT department."
Jake sold enterprise physical-security products to IT teams before founding Serval, which has raised a $47 million Series A to bring AI-native code generation to IT, then HR, finance and legal — gated behind the same code review and audit trail a junior engineer's work would go through.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 38 minutes of audio, 5 minutes of reading.
Here are the 5 takeaways that matter.
No Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups · Oct 29, 2026 · 38m · 33m saved
With Jake Stauch, Co-founder & CEO of Serval
Key Takeaways
ServiceNow's workflow platform runs IT "6 to 12 months behind" where a business needs it, and gets more expensive over time, Jake said
Serval brings code-generation to IT, then HR, finance and legal, gated behind code review, staging and an audit trail
Personal AI agents fail in large enterprises because an employee's own permissions are too narrow for an agent to do much with them
Jake rejects the strong "SaaS apocalypse" thesis: core systems of record survive, but narrow point-solution tools consolidate
Fully autonomous background agents are still "the ultimate moonshot" — nobody has figured out how to make them safe at scale, Jake said
1. The ServiceNow Frustration
Jake traced Serval's origin to his time selling physical-security products to IT teams at Verkada, where he'd ask customers what they spent the most on and hated most.
ServiceNow tops the list of what enterprise IT teams spend the most on and like least, Jake found
"ServiceNow would top a lot of those lists." — Jake Stauch
His diagnosis: ServiceNow is a powerful, customizable workflow platform, but every new idea has to be implemented by hand, often with consultants.
"Every idea you have for doing something cool, you have to go and implement... it's always kind of running 6 to 12 months behind where you want it to be. And then it's very expensive, and it keeps getting more expensive over time." — Jake Stauch
That gap is fine for something meant to last five to ten years unchanged, he said, but not for keeping pace with a business that keeps changing.
