2 months ago
Arrakis, a seven-month old London- and Paris-based startup building what it calls an AI "operating system" for industrial companies, is emerging from stealth with $38 million in venture capital funding. It says its goal is to bring agentic AI to sectors such aerospace, energy, logistics, and manufacturing.
The company's latest funding is a $30 million Series A led by Blossom Capital, with participation from venture capital firms Accel, GFC, MainObject, and Rerail. Accel led an earlier $7.5 million seed round, and individual backers include Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel and OpenAI's head of business products, Olivier Godement.
The latest round values the company at $140 million post-money, cofounder and CEO Rafael Quintanilla told Fortune.
Quintanilla is a former vice president at Accel. While there, he spent the better part of a year crisscrossing the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East to develop the firm's thesis on defense and industrial resilience. What he found convinced him to quit and become a founder himself.
"I realized that there was a huge gap between what I was seeing at Accel and in the Valley, with us investing in companies like Anthropic and Lovable in Europe," he said, "and what I was seeing in the more industrial parts of the economy."
He said that most AI has targeted so-called knowledge workers who complete their jobs using software, but that many more jobs in the economy involve the production and movement of physical goods. "Most AI investment to date has targeted the 30% of workers behind a desk. The real ROI lies in the 70% running industrial operations," he said.
Sonali de Rycker, the Accel partner who backed Arrakis's seed round, said she is betting on the founder as much as the market. "Rafa has a rare combination of curiosity, hustle and tireless drive," she told Fortune. "After working closely with Rafa during his time at Accel, it's an honour to be working with him again as an entrepreneur."
But Arrakis is hardly alone in going after manufacturing and industrial firms. Consulting giants such as Accenture and Boston Consulting Group are racing into industrial AI, as is Palantir, and Jeff Bezos-backed Prometheus—now valued in the tens of billions of dollars—is pouring capital into automating the engineering of physical products. The frontier labs are circling too.
Quintanilla argues Arrakis is carving out a distinct niche from each of these competitors. If Prometheus worked with Airbus, he said, it would build AI for "the core engineering of building an aircraft." He said Arrakis, by contrast, "want[s] to take care of everything around it… We want to be the AI layer for key operations of those companies."
#arrakis
The company's latest funding is a $30 million Series A led by Blossom Capital, with participation from venture capital firms Accel, GFC, MainObject, and Rerail. Accel led an earlier $7.5 million seed round, and individual backers include Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel and OpenAI's head of business products, Olivier Godement.
The latest round values the company at $140 million post-money, cofounder and CEO Rafael Quintanilla told Fortune.
Quintanilla is a former vice president at Accel. While there, he spent the better part of a year crisscrossing the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East to develop the firm's thesis on defense and industrial resilience. What he found convinced him to quit and become a founder himself.
"I realized that there was a huge gap between what I was seeing at Accel and in the Valley, with us investing in companies like Anthropic and Lovable in Europe," he said, "and what I was seeing in the more industrial parts of the economy."
He said that most AI has targeted so-called knowledge workers who complete their jobs using software, but that many more jobs in the economy involve the production and movement of physical goods. "Most AI investment to date has targeted the 30% of workers behind a desk. The real ROI lies in the 70% running industrial operations," he said.
Sonali de Rycker, the Accel partner who backed Arrakis's seed round, said she is betting on the founder as much as the market. "Rafa has a rare combination of curiosity, hustle and tireless drive," she told Fortune. "After working closely with Rafa during his time at Accel, it's an honour to be working with him again as an entrepreneur."
But Arrakis is hardly alone in going after manufacturing and industrial firms. Consulting giants such as Accenture and Boston Consulting Group are racing into industrial AI, as is Palantir, and Jeff Bezos-backed Prometheus—now valued in the tens of billions of dollars—is pouring capital into automating the engineering of physical products. The frontier labs are circling too.
Quintanilla argues Arrakis is carving out a distinct niche from each of these competitors. If Prometheus worked with Airbus, he said, it would build AI for "the core engineering of building an aircraft." He said Arrakis, by contrast, "want[s] to take care of everything around it… We want to be the AI layer for key operations of those companies."
#arrakis
