- Arrakis, a London startup, has come out of stealth mode after raising $38 million in funding over the past six months. Blossom Capital led the $30 million Series A round.
- Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel and OpenAI’s Olivier Godement invested their own money in the round, offering a rare show of support from top AI industry leaders instead of typical financial investors.
- The company focuses on the 70% of workers who don’t have desk jobs, quickly deploying AI agents in energy, aerospace, and logistics for customers listed on the NYSE.
London-based Arrakis has come out of stealth with $38 million raised over six months, including a $30 million Series A led by Blossom Capital. Existing investor Accel, which led the $7.5 million seed round in March, also participated, along with GFC, MainObject, and Rerail.
This funding round attracted Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog, and Olivier Godement, OpenAI’s head of business products, both of whom invested personally in the six-month-old startup. Junaid Hussain also joined as an angel investor.
“The West is under growing pressure to reindustrialise, but that renaissance won’t be powered by net new companies alone. It requires equipping our industrial champions with the tools to harness their data, navigate the AI transition and compete on a global stage. That’s exactly why we founded Arrakis,” says Rafael Quintanilla, Arrakis’ founder and chief executive.
Governments and businesses in the US and Europe are investing in industrial capacity and supply-chain resilience, but many organisations still use outdated software and manual processes. Arrakis aims to solve this ‘last mile’ problem, which keeps most enterprise AI projects from reaching production. The global AI agents market is expected to grow from about $8 billion in 2025 to over $52 billion by 2030, with enterprises driving demand.
Ex-Accel investor’s founding team
Arrakis started in January 2026, founded by Quintanilla, a former Accel investor, and co-founders Haroun Beltaifa, Romain Fouilland, and Mikhail Galkov. They previously worked at Palantir, Revolut, Delivery Hero, Datadog, and ASML. The company is based in London and Paris.
The startup places engineers on-site and uses a platform that works with clients’ current procurement, logistics, and operational systems. This avoids replacing old software and aims to deliver results in weeks instead of the usual months-long enterprise AI rollouts.
Arrakis says customer data and intellectual property stay with the client and are not used to train third-party models. The company links much of its fees to results, rather than charging flat licensing fees. One customer cut procurement cycle times by 90%.
Palantir and PhysicsX still loom larger
Arrakis is not the first to tackle this challenge and is not the best-funded. Palantir is still the top provider for mission-critical AI, with enterprise contracts from high six figures to eight figures, a scale Arrakis has not reached yet.
PhysicsX, another London company, recently raised $300 million at a $2.4 billion valuation to provide physics-based AI for aerospace and manufacturing engineering, focusing on design simulation instead of daily operations. Berlin’s INXM raised €5.7 million to make AI-generated workflows auditable for industrial manufacturers, and octonomy raised $20 million to bring agentic AI to manufacturing and field services.
While these competitors focus on scale, specialised physics models, or compliance, Arrakis stands out by offering fast deployment, data ownership guarantees, and a model-agnostic approach that doesn’t lock customers into one AI provider.
“A transformative company”
Ophelia Brown, managing partner at Blossom Capital, says, “Rafael and the Arrakis team have an exceptional combination of technical depth, operational expertise and commercial ambition. While many companies are focused on AI applications at the edge of the enterprise, Arrakis is tackling some of the most complex operational challenges facing large industrial organisations. Their early traction demonstrates both the scale of the opportunity and the demand for solutions that deliver measurable outcomes.”
Sonali De Rycker, partner at Accel, adds, “Rafael’s vision of how AI will transform the physical economy and his deep understanding of the challenges industrial companies face means he and the team are building a transformative company. In a short period of time, they’ve built an impressive business, attracted world-class talent and secured significant customer demand. We’re excited to continue supporting Arrakis as it scales globally.”
Arrakis plans to use the new funding to triple its staff, improve its platform and security, and open offices in New York and the Middle East, along with its current locations in London and Paris. The company has already signed its first US customer and is seeing more demand in aerospace, energy, and logistics.
Arrakis has earned strong support from insiders and early customers. Still, it doesn’t have Palantir’s installed base or PhysicsX’s financial backing. Whether Arrakis becomes a real challenger or an acquisition target for a bigger company will become clear in the next year.
