Access Granted

Jake Stauch spent years trying to make a neuroscience startup work and kept running into the same wall: there just weren’t enough buyers. Now he’s back with a very different bet. His company, Serval, is aimed at a much bigger pool of customers — any business with an IT team — and it wants to use AI to change what that team actually does.

That pitch lands because the old version of IT still looks a lot like the stereotype that made Dilbert famous. The work often means tickets, forms, and access requests, day after day. Serval’s automated service management platform is built to take some of that routine off people’s plates and push them toward building tools and protecting important data instead of just answering the next queue item.

Stauch didn’t come to that idea from theory. He came to it through failure. His first company, NeuroSpire, started with brain scans for ad effectiveness, then turned into NeuroPlus, a hardware and software play around focus and ADHD. For a while it looked promising. Parents bought. Kids used it. Monthly subscriptions rose. But the economics broke down, and Stauch eventually realized the market was far narrower than he had hoped: parents with disposable income and kids who had bad reactions to ADHD medication.

The collapse of that seven-year run hit hard. He tried to find an acquihire, even waited on a final call with Bose from a couch at home, and took the rejection as the end of the road. Then he pivoted again, this time into product management, studying interview prep and technical basics while trying to land at a company that actually had buyers for what it sold. Facebook’s VR division nearly worked out. Verkada did. And there, for the first time, he says he felt what a winnable game was like.

That matters because Serval sounds like the sort of company only someone like Stauch would build: a founder who has lived through both sides of the ticket system, first as the desperate builder and later as the person trying to make operations work inside a company with real demand. This isn’t about making IT glamorous. It’s about making the job less trapped in admin and more connected to building things that matter.