Riplo, a London-based startup developing the agentic operating system for consulting, announced it has raised €2.6 million (£2.3 million) in pre-Seed funding as it emerges from stealth.
The round was led by Cherry Ventures, with participation from Blue Lion Capital, the founders of QuantumBlack (McKinsey’s AI arm), and prominent angels from McKinsey, BCG, OpenAI, Apple, Goldman Sachs, Hg Capital, along with senior executives from the technology and professional services sectors.
“The $1 trillion (nearly €870 billion) consulting industry is currently running on the digital equivalent of a typewriter. You cannot achieve agentic speed inside a slide deck designed in the 90s. We aren’t building another chatbot; we are building the interface where the next generation of strategic analyses actually happens,” said Tobias Haefele, co-founder and CEO of Riplo.
Founded in 2025 by Tobias Haefele, Oliver Scott, and Zack Zornitta, the company provides the tooling layer spanning from infrastructure to interface that enables humans and AI agents to collaborate natively across consulting workflows.
The founding trio has firsthand experience of the pain caused by outdated consulting tools. Haefele and Scott initially met at QuantumBlack, where they developed AI-native products. They reconnected at Hg Capital, while advising on AI due diligence and value creation. There, they met Zornitta, an engineering lead experienced in building and scaling AI-native software. Together, they bring a blend of consulting expertise and practical experience in delivering agentic products.
According to the company, AI has transformed knowledge work across software engineering, law, and investment banking, yet consulting remains stuck between two worlds.
It states that the tools consultants rely on daily were designed for manual, human-only workflows, such as slide decks assembled box by box, and models built cell by cell. They are slow and tedious for users and equally unfriendly for AI agents, which cannot effectively operate within interfaces that rely on manual formatting and are stored on individual users’ file systems.
Unlike legacy software that treats AI as an external assistant, Riplo claims that its interface allows agents to draft, structure, and stress-test workstreams directly alongside the consultant in a unified, live environment. It moves consultants from ‘building’ to ‘curating,’ enabling faster iteration around artefact creation, storylining, and client impact.
“Professional services is one of the largest and least disrupted markets in the world, and AI is finally changing that. Riplo is building a deep, vertical-specific platform for the world’s most elite firms, and Tobias, Oliver, and Zack are exactly the team to do it. Cherry is proud to back them,” said Christian Meermann, Partner at Cherry Ventures.
With this new capital, the company intends to strengthen its collaborations with design partners, grow its engineering team, and keep progressing towards its vision.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/03/uks-riplo-emerges-from-stealth-with-e2-6-million-to-build-the-agentic-operating-system-for-consulting/
