Silicon Valley startup Novaworks.ai has officially come out of stealth with an ambitious vision and fresh capital. On March 23, 2026, the company announced the launch of what it calls the first AI-native “agentic operating system” for Total Workforce Management (TWM), along with an $8 million seed round.
The funding was led by Stalwart Ventures, with strategic participation from ServiceNow Ventures and Bell Ventures. This early capital will be used to accelerate product development, go-to-market efforts, and initial enterprise deployments.
Novaworks positions its platform as a unified operating system that brings together full-time employees, contractors, and AI agents under one intelligent layer. Built natively on the ServiceNow platform, it aims to replace the fragmented patchwork of traditional HR tools with autonomous “Nova agents” that don’t just recommend actions, they actually execute them. These agents can handle scheduling, task routing, issue escalation, onboarding flows, dynamic resource allocation, and real-time performance support across connected enterprise systems.
Co-founders Kelley Steven-Waiss and Eswar Vandanapu, together with Chief Product Officer Melanie Lougee, bring deep enterprise software and HR tech experience. Their core argument is simple: the modern workforce now includes humans and AI agents working side by side. Legacy HCM systems were never designed for this hybrid reality, so Novaworks built its platform from the ground up to treat AI agents as first-class digital colleagues.
ServiceNow Ventures’ participation is particularly notable, signaling strong alignment with the ServiceNow ecosystem and confidence that agentic AI can fundamentally reshape people operations the same way it is transforming IT service management and customer experience.
For enterprises, the promise is a single intelligent system that actively manages the entire workforce lifecycle with far less manual intervention. Whether this approach can deliver measurable ROI while meeting strict security, compliance, and governance requirements will be the key test in the coming quarters.
The $8 million seed round gives Novaworks the runway to move beyond early pilots and prove its agentic workforce OS in real enterprise environments. In a crowded HR tech market increasingly focused on AI, the combination of native ServiceNow integration and genuine agent-first architecture makes this one of the more interesting bets in the emerging “agentic enterprise” space.
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