Startup Aims to Transform Enterprise Software with Prompt-Like Interface

Every new technology reshapes our work environment, but the specific impact of AI remains uncertain. One potential outcome is the complete disappearance of the traditional user interface.

This is the vision of Josh Sirota, founder of the startup Eragon. Launched in August, the company recently secured $12 million in funding at a $100 million post-money valuation to develop an agentic AI operating system for enterprise clients.

The core thesis is straightforward: "Software as we know it is obsolete," Sirota states. Buttons, dialog boxes, and dropdown menus belong to the past; future business operations will be driven by prompts. Eragon aims to deliver the entire suite of business software—platforms like Salesforce, Snowflake, Tableau, and Jira—through a single LLM interface.

Sirota, whose background includes go-to-market roles at Oracle and Salesforce, admits to experiencing a quarter-life crisis before relocating to San Francisco. He launched Eragon with a small team from a live-work loft opposite the Giants' baseball stadium. On a recent sunny Wednesday, the dining table held a bottle of Moët, several Mac minis, and a copy of the fantasy novel "Eragon" by Christopher Paolini, which inspired the company's name—following in the footsteps of Palantir and Anduril, which also drew from fictional lore.

His hands-on experience deploying major corporate software convinced investors of his strong "founder-market fit." Backers include Arielle Zuckerberg at Long Journey Ventures, Soma Capital, Axiom Partners, and strategic angels like Mike Knoop and Elias Torres.

"We see tremendous potential for Eragon to become the essential connective tissue for how modern teams operate and make decisions," said Sandhya Venkatachalam of Axiom. The technical team features Rishabh Tiwari, a Berkeley computer science PhD student, and Vin Agarwal, an MIT PhD; together, they are building the company's core technology stack.

At Eragon's customer center of excellence—a well-worn white sofa—Sirota demonstrates how the company uses its own product. Eragon fine-tunes open-source models such as Qwen and Kimi on customer datasets and integrates with company email and other resources. To onboard a new client—demonstrated with Dedalus Labs, which is adopting the tool this week—Sirota simply issues a natural language prompt. The software then automatically assigns user credentials, provisions a new Eragon instance in the cloud, and initiates an onboarding workflow.

Sirota envisions Eragon as the platform executives will use to request analysis on at-risk deals or to identify steps for improving supply chain lead times, then deploying AI agents to execute actions. Need a dashboard? Just ask Eragon to create one.

The demonstration is impressive, though it's easy to imagine edge-case queries that could confuse the system or complex failures that are difficult to audit. Sirota even uses Eragon to showcase automatic invoice approval—the system processes invoices directly from his inbox—which tempted this reporter to submit one just to see the outcome. (For the record, I did not.)

While the security implications of AI agents are significant, Eragon is currently focused on refining its product in real-world settings. It is already deployed in several large enterprises and dozens of startups. Nico Laqua, CEO of the insurance startup Corgi, which raised $180 million after graduating from Y Combinator last year, called Eragon "the best applied AI solution for enterprise on the market."

"Most of our data must remain secure and within our own cloud environment," Laqua explained. "Eragon trains state-of-the-art models specifically on our data and deploys them within our own infrastructure."

This is central to Eragon's value proposition: a company's data remains on its own servers within its security perimeter, and it retains ownership of its model weights—the fundamental parameters that dictate an AI's behavior. Sirota believes models trained on years of proprietary corporate data will themselves become valuable assets. While frontier AI labs may offer the most capable general models, as long as companies must access them via API without owning their configurations, Sirota is confident Eragon holds a competitive edge.

He compares AI's evolution to the shift from mainframes to personal computers: frontier labs provide powerful, centralized services, but widespread corporate adoption will hinge on localized, purpose-built tools. Businesses will require tailored agents and models for their specific needs and will demand control over them.

A few days later, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang echoed a similar perspective at Nvidia's GTC developer conference. He argued that agentic AI tools for enterprise will overhaul current white-collar work paradigms: "It's analogous to how Windows enabled the personal computer revolution... every single SaaS company will evolve into an 'Agentic as a Service' provider."

Huang's comments related to Nvidia's new initiative, NemoClaw, designed to help OpenClaw agents operate within secure enterprise systems. This signals both that Sirota's vision is gaining traction and that competition—from frontier labs to model wrapper companies—will be intense.

Sirota remains undeterred, forecasting that Eragon will become a billion-dollar company by year's end. He acknowledges the often-cited MIT statistic that 95% of corporate AI pilots fail to gain adoption, joking that it's because senior leadership often lacks visibility into daily employee workflows. Eragon aims to give them a tool that delivers tangible, actionable value.