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One of the greatest privileges in this business is backing exceptional people on incredibly ambitious missions. Getting to do it twice, with the same person, is something else entirely. ICONIQ’s partnership with Amit Agarwal, one of the most exceptional people we’ve worked with, started more than a decade ago. And today, we begin again.
Our relationship with Amit started at Datadog where we were early partners and witnessed firsthand the depth of his impact on the company as chief product officer and later, president. His contributions were so foundational that co-founders Alexis Lê-Quôc and Olivier Pomel have long viewed him as a co-founder in all but name. We saw how he helped build teams and products with deep technical instinct, uncompromising standards, and a relentless focus on the customer experience. When Amit later joined ICONIQ as a Partner to discover what was next, those same qualities inspired and informed our community of founders and leaders. He became a trusted advisor to many companies in our portfolio, delivering meaningful and sustained value.
When Amit shared with us what he wanted to build, we could see the bright lights in his eyes and the depth of his conviction. Our reaction was immediate: we wanted to build it alongside him from day zero.
We are honored to announce the incubation of Amit’s new company, Standard Template Labs, as we lead their seed round—a first for ICONIQ—and support its launch from stealth.
The launch of Standard Template Labs is an opportunity to rethink one of the largest deeply established categories in enterprise software. Service management represents a market measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars. It underpins access, security, compliance, onboarding, device management, and internal operations. It touches nearly every employee inside every major organization. Yet the systems that power it were built to record work, not resolve it.
Enterprises spend billions of dollars each year on activities such as manual coordination, triaging tickets, chasing approvals, stitching together context across fragmented tools, and maintaining complex custom workflows that are difficult to scale and maintain.
Platforms like ServiceNow were architected around queues and workflows, with automation layered in over time. They were designed as systems of record and routing, not systems of resolution. Over the years, enterprises have built deep customization around these platforms, creating high switching costs but also fragility. What once looked like defensibility has become liability. The more complex the customization, the harder the system is to evolve.
Amit heard this pain firsthand in more than 100 conversations with CIOs and other builders. The themes were consistent: tickets that take weeks or months to resolve, flaky systems held together by layers of custom code, employees waiting for access just to do their jobs, and teams throwing headcount at problems that software was meant to solve. Service management has quietly become one of the largest productivity drags inside modern enterprises.
Agentic AI changes the equation.
For the first time, software can move beyond routing requests to resolving them—if it has the right context. Standard Template Labs is building a context-aware, AI-native service management platform that’s grounded in a real-time understanding of how an organization operates. That includes the relationships between people, systems, permissions, policies, and devices. With that foundation, AI agents can interpret intent, assemble relevant context automatically, and safely resolve a meaningful share of requests. Meanwhile, humans remain in the loop where judgment and oversight are required.
The shift is fundamental, moving from managing tickets to achieving resolution— Standard Template Lab’s ultimate goal.
Amit has lived through multiple technology inflection points, from distributed systems to cloud and SaaS. He recognized AI as another moment when foundational categories are being rebuilt from first principles. Service management is massive, mission-critical, and structurally misaligned with how modern enterprises operate today and in the years ahead. When a category this central meets a technology shift this powerful, the opportunity is significant.
We have seen how Amit builds—with customer obsession, technical depth, and long-term integrity. He has recruited a strong and experienced team driving aggressively at this ambitious mission. Backing Standard Template Labs is a continuation of a long partnership, deep conviction and trust and a shared belief that agentic AI can radically transform one of the biggest areas in software. The past decade of our journey with Amit has been incredible. We are excited for the new opportunities, new challenges, and uncommon outcomes ahead with Amit and the growing Standard Template Labs team.
Published:
March 17, 2026
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