Every new technology creates a new environment in which we work, but it’s not clear how AI will do that. One possibility is that the interface disappears entirely.
That’s the vision of Josh Sirota, who founded the startup Eragon back in August and has just raised $12 million at a $100 million post-money valuation to build an agentic AI operating system for enterprise customers.
There’s a simple thesis: “Software is dead,” Sirota says. Buttons and dialog boxes and pull-down menus are a thing of the past, and future business will be done by prompt. Eragon is attempting to offer the whole suite of business software — your Salesforces, Snowflakes, Tableaus, and Jiras — through an LLM interface.
Sirota, who worked on go-to-market teams at Oracle and Salesforce, admits to suffering a bit of a quarter-life crisis in the lead-up to moving to San Francisco and launching Eragon with a small team from a live-work loft across the street from the Giants’ baseball park. On a recent, sunny Wednesday, the dining room table sports a bottle of Moët, several Mac minis, and a copy of the book Eragon, the Christopher Paolini fantasy novel that gave the company its name — in the tradition of Palantir and Anduril, which also borrowed from fictional worlds.
Sirota’s experience implementing the world’s premier corporate software convinced investors of his “founder-market fit.” His backers include Arielle Zuckerberg at Long Journey Ventures, Soma Capital, Axiom Partners, and strategic angels Mike Knoop and Elias Torres.
“We see enormous potential for Eragon to become the connective tissue for how modern teams operate and make decisions,” Axiom’s Sandhya Venkatachalam said. Eragon’s technical talent includes Rishabh Tiwari, a Berkeley computer science PhD student, and Vin Agarwal, an MIT PhD; together, they’re building out the company’s tech stack.
At Eragon’s customer center of excellence — a battered white sofa — Sirota shows how the company eats its own dog food. Eragon post-trains open source models like Qwen and Kimi on customer datasets, and links to company email accounts and other resources. When Sirota wants bring on a new customer — he demonstrates with Dedalus Labs, which is adopting the tool this week — he asks in a natural language prompt, and the software automatically assigns each new user credentials, spins up a new Eragon instance in the cloud, and begins an onboarding workflow.
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Sirota expects Eragon to be the software executives ask for analysis on what deals might slip, or for steps to take to improve supply chain lead times, then assign agents to take action. Want a dashboard? Just ask Eragon to spin one up.
The demo is compelling, but it’s easy to imagine edge queries that baffle the software, or hard-to-audit failures. Sirota even uses Eragon to demonstrate automatic invoice approval — the system processes invoices as they arrive in his own inbox — which prompted this reporter to consider submitting one, just to see what would happen. (Reader, I did not.)
The security concerns raised by AI agents are big, but for now the company is trying to work out the kinks in real workplaces; Eragon is now in use in a handful of large businesses and dozens of startups. Nico Laqua, the CEO of Corgi, an insurance startup that raised $180 million after emerging from Y Combinator last year, called Eragon “the best applied AI for enterprise in the market.”
“Most of the data we have needs to remain secure and behind our own cloud,” Laqua said. “Eragon trains state-of-the-art models for us on our data and deploys it in our own environment.”
That’s central to Eragon’s pitch: A company’s data stays within its own servers and security environment, and it owns its own model weights — the underlying parameters that define how an AI behaves. Sirota expects models trained on years or decades of corporate data will become valuable assets in themselves. And while frontier labs may have the most capable models, as long as companies must access them via API and without owning their configurations, Sirota believes Eragon will have an advantage in the marketplace.
He compares the evolution of AI software to the transition from mainframes to the personal computer: Frontier labs offer powerful, centralized services, but mass corporate adoption will depend on local tools for bespoke purposes. Companies will need agents and models for their specific purposes and will want to control them.
A few days later, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang offers a similar take at GTC, Nvidia’s annual developer conference, arguing that agentic AI tools for enterprise will replace our existing approach to white-collar work: “It is no different than how Windows made it possible for us to create personal computers…every single SaaS company will become Agentic-as-a-Service.”
Huang’s comments pertain to Nvidia’s new initiative, NemoClaw, which aims to make it easier for OpenClaw agents to work within secure enterprise systems. It’s a sign both that Sirota is on to something — and that the competition from everyone from frontier labs to model wrappers will be fierce.
Sirota is undaunted, saying he expects Eragon to be a billion-dollar company by the end of the year. He knows the oft-cited MIT figure that 95% of AI corporate trials fail to catch on, but he jokes that it’s because senior executives don’t know what their employees do all day. Eragon aims to give them something they can really work with.
