The raise gives Sierra more than $1 billion to work with — capital the company says it will use to become the "global standard" for AI-powered customer experiences.

The portfolio he has assembled since 2019 is dotted with technologies that have become more widely interesting to VCs over the last year.

Within hours he'd thrown up a website — a janky, one-hour job, by his own admission — and by Sunday, 36,000 "founding patrons" had pledged nearly $23 million, crashing his servers in the process.

Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber's chief technology officer, revealed the plan in an interview at TechCrunch's StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, describing it as a natural extension of a nascent program the company announced in late January called AV Labs.

At TechCrunch's sold-out StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, we covered a lot of ground in a short time, beginning with the question everyone in the industry is asking right now: in a world where rival Cursor is reportedly in talks to be acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion, is Replit also bound to sell?

It's a story Musk has told before -- in interviews and to author Walter Isaacson for his bestselling biography of Musk -- but Tuesday was the first time he said it under oath.