The week agents stopped being demos and started closing enterprise budgets.
Sierra raises $950M
On May 4, customer-experience agent company Sierra raised about $950M at a ~$15.8B valuation (led by Tiger Global and GV, with Benchmark, Sequoia, and Greenoaks). Sierra says it now has more than $1B to deploy and crossed $100M ARR roughly seven quarters after launch — a marker of how fast support agents are being adopted.
Perplexity takes 'Computer' into the enterprise
Also on May 4, Perplexity shipped its Computer agent into Microsoft Teams with enterprise usage analytics and better source threading; days later (May 7) it made its desktop "Personal Computer" agent available to all Mac users. Research tools are quietly becoming desktop operators that do the multi-step work, not just answer.
Anthropic packages finance workflows
On May 5, Anthropic launched ten prebuilt financial-services agent templates (pitchbooks, KYC screening, month-end close) inside Claude — the "package the workflow, not just the model" approach that defines the agent layer.
What it means if you're picking tools
Support and research are where agents are landing first. Compare customer support and research.
Sources: Sierra raises $950M (TechCrunch) · Perplexity enterprise (VentureBeat) · Anthropic finance agents