London-based Arrakis has emerged from stealth with a $30 million Series A funding round to deploy AI agents inside the operational systems of industrial companies.
Blossom Capital led the round, with participation from Accel, GFC, MainObject and Rerail. Accel previously led Arrakis’s $7.5 million seed round, bringing its total funding to roughly $38 million just six months after it was founded. A US securities filing shows Arrakis sold $30.4 million of equity in the round, slightly above the $30 million headline figure announced by the company.
Arrakis was founded in January 2026 by former Accel investor Rafael Quintanilla, alongside Haroun Beltaifa, Romain Fouilland and Mikhail Galkov. The team includes former employees of Palantir, Delivery Hero, Revolut, Datadog and semiconductor equipment manufacturer ASML.
The company is targeting the gap between experimenting with generative AI and putting it into production. Its engineers work directly with industrial customers to build agents that operate across procurement, finance, supply chains, project delivery and other operational workflows.
Arrakis’s pitch is essentially Palantir-style deployment for the generative AI era, using forward-deployed engineers, a configurable software platform and deep integration with customers’ existing systems.
Asked if they would focus on defence, Quintanilla said over a call with Pathfounders: “The lion's share of what we are doing today is on the commercial side. So it's working for companies that are enterprises of an industrial nature across aerospace, logistics and shipping, construction, as well as, you know, a few other areas, like manufacturing.”
Quintanilla said they were deploying engineers into the client business, which often has very old software, but that AI now “allows you to totally circumvent the inflexible nature of those integrations.”
The company says its platform is model-agnostic, allowing customers to switch between commercial and open AI models according to performance, cost and security requirements. Rather than replacing ERP, asset-management or operational software, Arrakis connects agents to the systems already in place. Its website describes applications spanning energy trading, industrial procurement, aerospace programmes and construction project delivery.
Arrakis also says it does not use customer data or intellectual property to train third-party models and ties a significant portion of its fees to agreed business outcomes.
Cogna, which I covered in 2024 is probably the closest UK startup comparison. It builds AI-native applications and agent workflows around operational processes in utilities, energy, infrastructure, telecoms and field services. Like Arrakis, it connects to existing systems including SAP, SCADA, GIS and legacy databases rather than requiring customers to replace them. Cogna raised a $15 million Series A led by Notion Capital in 2024.
Gigaton, which we covered in June, is building autonomous control software for energy-intensive plants including cement, steel, glass and chemicals. It raised a $26 million Series A led by Plural in June 2026.
Juna.ai develops agents that steer and optimise industrial production processes, putting it closer to factory control than Arrakis’s broader enterprise-workflow approach. The Berlin startup launched with a $7.5 million seed round led by Kleiner Perkins.
However, Quintanilla said: “I think the ones we are coming across more and more are, or at least in the conversations, Wonderful AI and Poetic in the U.S. as well as the most old school companies like Palantir.”
Arrakis has not disclosed its customers, saying only that they include NYSE-listed companies in energy, logistics and industrial markets. It claims early deployments have reduced procurement cycle times by as much as 90%, although those figures could not be independently verified.
Quintanilla argues that most enterprise AI spending has so far focused on office workers, while the larger opportunity lies in the operational workforce running factories, infrastructure and supply chains.
The new funding will be used to triple headcount, strengthen the platform’s security and deployment capabilities, and open offices in New York and the Middle East. Arrakis currently operates from London and Paris and has signed its first US customer.
