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Jake Stauch

Co-Founder & CEO at Serval

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About Jake Stauch

Jake Stauch is the co-founder and CEO of Serval, an enterprise service management and automation platform that competes directly with ServiceNow. Serval lets IT teams build automations, such as password resets, access requests and onboarding, by describing them to coding agents, then runs the generated code through approvals, staging and an audit trail. IT teams extend the platform to HR, finance, people and legal departments.

Before Serval, Stauch spent about five years at Verkada, where he worked with IT teams buying its physical security products. He founded Serval in 2024 with Alex McLeod, a fellow Verkada alum. By October 2026 the company had 200 employees, up from 20 in January, and counted Fox Corporation among customers that adopted it company-wide.

Career Highlights

  • Co-founder and CEO of Serval, founded in 2024
  • Previously at Verkada, selling to and building for enterprise IT teams
  • Grew Serval from 20 to 200 people between January and October 2026

Notable Positions

On Code as the Automation Layer

Stauch argues that drag-and-drop workflow builders are too complex for non-technical users and too abstracted for technical ones. Once coding agents made code cheap to write, code became the better way to express enterprise automation.

On Guardrails as the Product

Serval doesn't build models. Its product is the boundary around them: access requests, approvals, just-in-time privileges and audit logs. He expects enterprises to cut everyone's permissions to strict least privilege as agents spread, which makes the layer that grants exceptions more essential.

On Forward Deployed Engineers

Serval sends deployment strategists and deployed engineers on site but never builds bespoke features. Automations many customers build by hand become product features, and an automation engineering team called ProServal handles ongoing demand.

On Pricing and the SaaSpocalypse

Serval prices per workflow run rather than per token. Stauch expects consolidation among point solutions and middleware, while systems of record such as ERP, HRIS, ITSM and CRM survive under new incumbents.

Key Quotes

  • "Serval is the boundary. Serval is the guardrails." (on Serval's role in enterprise AI)
  • "Most companies have an IT department, not a team of software engineers." (on who builds automation)
  • "We try to price on workflows run because I think it's a better reflection of actual work being done versus just tokens" (on pricing)