Things move quickly in the agentic AI space.
Sweden’s Lovable raised $200m and hit unicorn status just four months on from picking up a $16m seed round. Germany’s N8n is on track to pick up another $100m and reach a valuation of $2bn as many months after its previous raise.
Investors are showing no signs of slowing down. VCs have already funnelled €2.3bn into startups building AI agents so far this year, according to Sifted data, already topping the €1.7bn invested in 2024, and there’s still five months left to play with.
And it’s been anything but quiet at the crop of startups nominated by investors when we last asked which agentic companies they had their eyes on in February.
Two have already been acquired for upwards of $1bn, three have gone on to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and there’s been leadership turmoil at another.
So which startups will be making headlines next? Sifted asked VCs at Cherry Ventures, Speedinvest, Firstminute Capital and Creandum to find out.
Sophia Escheu, senior associate at Speedinvest
Manex AI — Germany
Manex develops autonomous AI agents that optimise manufacturing through real-time decision-making and process control. Its system enhances defect detection and reduces costs. Founded in 2023, Manex has managed to land contracts with some of the largest industrial enterprises in Europe within a short amount of time.
Zauber — Germany
Zauber is a stealth company in the logistics space. Founded by Erik Muttersbach, one of the entrepreneurs behind logistics unicorn Forto, Zauber tackles inefficiencies of the industry with AI driven automation.
Arondite — UK
Defence organisations increasingly rely on mixed autonomous systems, but current tools haven’t kept pace. Arondite aims to fix that by building a platform that works with any hardware and helps teams plan missions and manage data in real time.
The company was founded by an impressive team with deep military and defence experience, which will be extremely helpful as they go to market.
Michael Stothard, principal at Firstminute Capital (and former Sifted editor)
Strawberry Browser — Sweden
Strawberry Browser is a next-generation browser where AI agents live natively, able to automate complex workflows across any website, even behind login forms. Strawberry’s agents have persistent context about your work and can perform actions using your actual accounts.
One interesting part is their approach to human-AI collaboration. Agents ask for approval before taking potentially destructive actions while learning your preferences and workflows over time, making them genuinely useful digital colleagues rather than simple automation tools.
ZML — France
ZML is solving a major bottleneck in AI deployment: inference optimisation. The startup provides a Python-free, hardware-agnostic inference engine that delivers performance across high performing chips. What makes it particularly interesting is its “build once, run everywhere” approach with zero vendor lock-in, combined with industry-leading latency and throughput that significantly reduces total cost of ownership for enterprises scaling AI workloads.
Fern Labs — UK
Fern is building a generalised multi-agent system that can autonomously work for up to eight hours to transform ideas into working product and tool prototypes with demo videos within enterprises. Its value proposition lies in democratising app development through natural language prompts.
Hanel Baveja, partner at Creandum
Ankar AI — UK
Ankar is building an AI agent platform for intellectual property (IP). Founded by Palantir alumni, Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi, Ankar leverages AI agents to improve how companies can discover, protect and commercialise new IP. Its vision is to become the operating system for innovation. Within its first year, Ankar has seen strong traction with multiple Fortune 500 companies.
Tandem Health — Sweden
Tandem Health is building an AI medical assistant for clinicians that generates their clinical notes as they speak with patients, improving care and reducing time spent on admin. Over 200k NHS professionals in the UK have access to Tandem’s tech — one of the largest rollouts of healthcare AI in the world.
Gradient Labs — UK
Gradient Labs offers specialised AI customer service agents for financial services. It goes beyond chat functionality to automate critical backend processes in financial services that customers don’t see such as, processing documents, screening for fraud or sanctions, and supporting customers in vulnerable situations.
Christian Meerman, founding partner at Cherry Ventures
StackOne — UK
StackOne tackles one of the most tedious parts of building agents: integrations. Its unified APIs wrap thousands of SaaS endpoints, so developers can plug an agent into Slack, HubSpot or Jira with minimal work.
Governance and permissioning are baked in, which matters when agents touch sensitive data. By standardising the messy layer between agents and business apps, StackOne can slot into every serious agent deployment. Solving the integration headache is a universal need, giving StackOne hooks into every ambitious agent build potentially making it a very relevant infrastructure play.
Granola — UK
Granola captures the notes, transcripts and links that spill out of daily meetings and messages, then builds a searchable memory for each user. Instead of another meeting bot, it works quietly in the background and surfaces relevant context when you need it-like past decisions or action items tied to a topic. That living knowledge graph becomes the perfect data source for future personal agents, giving Granola a long runway beyond just making better notes for users.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/ai-agent-startups-to-watch-2/
