Sunny Gupta has led two enterprise tech companies with backing from Madrona over the past 20 years. Now he is launching a third.
Gupta and Kurt Shintaffer, who previously co-founded Apptio and sold it to IBM for $4.6 billion, have reunited to launch Thira, a Bellevue-based enterprise AI startup. The company raised $21 million in seed funding led by Madrona, with participation from FUSE.
Thira is building AI agents to handle back-office tasks that keep large companies running: setting up a new hire’s laptop, resetting a locked account, or approving a software purchase. The pitch is a “back-office that runs itself,” starting with IT support and expanding into finance and HR.
The founding team includes leaders from Atlassian, Oracle, and Databricks. Thira is entering a competitive space where ServiceNow recently acquired Moveworks for $2.85 billion, but the company’s bet is that Gupta and Shintaffer’s decades of relationships with CIOs will give it a foothold. Thira is already working with 10 design partners ahead of a broader launch this fall.
