Arrakis exits stealth with $38 million for industrial AI agents
Blossom led the London startup’s $30 million Series A, with Accel and operator angels joining a push into AI for industrial operations.
By Marcus Adeyemi · Startups Editor
· 3 min read
Arrakis has emerged from stealth with $38 million raised in six months, including a $30 million Series A led by Blossom Capital, to sell AI agents into industrial operations. The London and Paris startup is targeting companies in energy, aerospace and logistics, where the pitch is faster deployment of AI into existing procurement, logistics and operational systems.
Accel, which led Arrakis’ $7.5 million seed round in March, also participated in the Series A. GFC, MainObject and Rerail joined the financing, along with personal investments from Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel and Olivier Godement, OpenAI’s head of business products. Junaid Hussein, founder of Cambridge Aerospace, also invested as an angel. Arrakis did not disclose its valuation, revenue, current headcount or customer count.
The company was founded in January 2026 by Rafael Quintanilla, a former Accel investor, with Haroun Beltaifa, Romain Fouilland and Mikhail Galkov. The team previously worked at Palantir, Revolut, Delivery Hero, Datadog and ASML, according to Arrakis.
Industrial AI with on-site deployment
Arrakis says it focuses on the roughly 70% of workers who do not sit at desks, a group often left outside generic enterprise software rollouts. Its customers include New York Stock Exchange-listed companies, though the startup did not name them.
The company’s model combines software with engineers placed on-site at customers. Arrakis says its platform connects with systems already used for procurement, logistics and operations rather than requiring customers to replace them. The startup claims this approach can produce deployments in weeks, compared with enterprise AI projects that often take months.
Arrakis also says customer data and intellectual property remain with the client and are not used to train third-party models. The company says a meaningful portion of its fees is tied to outcomes rather than flat software licensing, and that one customer reduced procurement cycle times by 90%. It did not name the customer or provide a baseline for that metric.
Quintanilla has framed the company around reindustrialisation in the US and Europe, arguing that existing industrial companies need better tools to use their data and adopt AI. That is a broad claim, but the timing is clear: governments and enterprises are spending on supply-chain resilience and industrial capacity, while many operational workflows still depend on old software and manual processes.
A crowded category with larger incumbents
Arrakis is entering a field where budgets are real, sales cycles are difficult and incumbents are entrenched. Palantir remains a major provider for mission-critical enterprise AI, with contracts that can run from high six figures to eight figures, a scale Arrakis has not said it has reached.
Other European companies are also raising capital around industrial AI. London-based PhysicsX recently raised $300 million at a $2.4 billion valuation for physics-based AI used in aerospace and manufacturing engineering, with more emphasis on design simulation than day-to-day operations. Berlin’s INXM raised €5.7 million for auditable AI-generated workflows in industrial manufacturing, while octonomy raised $20 million for agentic AI in manufacturing and field services.
Arrakis’ claimed differentiation is speed of deployment, customer control over data and a model-agnostic setup that avoids tying customers to one AI provider. Those are useful selling points in industrial accounts, but the company has not disclosed retention, annual recurring revenue or enough customer detail to assess repeatability.
MarketsandMarkets expects the AI agents market to rise from about $8 billion in 2025 to more than $52 billion by 2030, with enterprises driving demand. Arrakis plans to use the new capital to triple its staff, invest in its platform and security, and open offices in New York and the Middle East. The company says it has signed its first US customer and is seeing demand from aerospace, energy and logistics.
This story draws on original reporting from TechFundingNews.
