Serval's Jake Stauch says IT can bring coding agents to every team

Jake Stauch is co-founder and CEO of Serval. He said on the podcast No Priors that IT departments can bring coding agents to the rest of a company. The episode was posted Thursday.

For most workers this is about the tools their own company builds for them. Requests to HR, finance or legal could get faster fixes if IT can build them with AI. Stauch's pitch is that this stays safe inside large companies.

A coding agent is AI that keeps working on a task by itself. Stauch said engineers already use them because code review makes it safe to build something powerful before it goes live. He wants the same for other teams. Here is how he put it.

"we build a platform that brings coding agents to IT departments who then can bring it to HR and finance"

He said new work goes through staging, approval and an audit trail. He said most companies have an IT department, not a team of software engineers. He added that Serval can use service accounts, which let an agent do more than one employee's own permissions allow, under strict approval steps.

SiliconANGLE reported Thursday that Serval raised $150 million at a $3 billion valuation to bring its automation agents beyond IT. Serval sells this platform, so the pitch is also its business. Stauch said the approval steps are more annoying than a personal AI assistant, but he said large companies need them.

Watch the 3 minutes where he explains it.3:04