Magentic raises $18M to automate industrial operations with AI agents

Magentic, a provider of AI-powered digital workers for industrial
companies, has raised $18 million in Series A funding, a year after its launch.
The round was led by Felicis, with participation from existing investors
Sequoia Capital and The Westly Group.

Magentic develops AI agents designed to automate procurement and
operational workflows for large manufacturers. Its digital workers are
multi-agent systems that operate through tools already used by employees,
including Microsoft Teams, email and companies’ internal systems.

The agents can manage workflows end-to-end, including assessing whether
to buy or build products, selecting suppliers, negotiating contracts, managing
orders and processing invoices. Magentic supports both indirect procurement and
direct spend on raw materials and other inputs used in manufacturing.

The company is targeting industrial and procurement teams facing growing
workloads amid increased manufacturing demand, trade disruption and pressure on
budgets. Magentic says its technology is designed to operate across the complex
and fragmented technology environments common in global manufacturing, where
companies may manage billions of data points, large procurement budgets and a
mix of legacy enterprise software and spreadsheets.

The physical world is dealing with the biggest capex cycle in
history, driven by AI demand, during a time of trade disruption and
geopolitical challenges. The companies that build the best intelligence into
every decision they make will be the ones that compound their competitive
advantage,

said Robin Van Aeken, CEO and co-founder of Magentic.

The platform includes security controls for enterprise deployments,
including zero-data-retention agreements with major AI providers, support for
different cloud environments and isolated deployments across different data
regions.

Odhran O’Donoghue, CTO and co-founder of Magentic, said bringing advanced AI into physical-world applications requires systems capable of handling significantly more context:

We’re building AI that can diagnose
problems, plan the fixes, take action, and see work through across gigabytes
and terabytes of multimodal data at once.

The new funding will be used to accelerate the development of Magentic’s
AI agents, extend the platform across additional procurement and supply chain
workflows, and support research into AI systems capable of handling complex
optimisation problems across industrial operations.