Enterprises, especially in the industrial and manufacturing sectors in the Nordics, grapple with fragmented, manual processes across key operational functions such as procurement, supply chain management, compliance, and inventory control. Kovant addresses this by offering a platform that enables teams of autonomous AI agents to manage entire business functions end-to-end.
To launch globally and expand in regions including Switzerland and the Benelux countries, Kovant has raised €1.5M in pre-seed funding as it officially launches worldwide. The round was led by J12 Ventures, with participation from Ampli, Green Ventures, and several well-known angel investors, including Sara Öhrvall and Emmanuel Martin-Chave.
Ali Sarrafi, Kovant’s CEO and co-founder, told TFN, “At the time of our most recent funding round, Kovant was valued at €10 million.”
AI agents that handle full business functions
The company was founded by execs from Spotify, Bosch, Meta, Amazon, and Google, and is led by CEO Ali Sarrafi, who previously ran AI programs at Spotify and helped scale an AI company used by Ericsson, H&M, SAS, and SEB.
Sarrafi says, “There’s this idea that big enterprises can’t make AI deliver real value without undertaking massive transformation projects. But that’s just not true. Too often, AI is used in ways that strip the human element out of work. We’ve flipped that. We’re pioneering a system where AI handles the execution so people can focus on what actually needs human judgment. What matters to us is real P&L impact, not building more agents or running endless POCs. Something that can be achieved in weeks, not months.”
Kovant’s platform differentiates itself through a specialised “agentic” architecture powered by Small Language Models (SLMs), which reduce errors and hallucinations common in large generalist AI models. Each AI agent works within strict guardrails to ensure accuracy, compliance, auditability, and security.
Unlike Salesforce and ERP systems, Kovant’s agents autonomously run full functions, including procurement, supply chain, compliance, and customer success. Kovant’s fully autonomous agent teams set it apart in speed, scalability, and enterprise governance. The platform is ISO-certified, integrates easily with existing enterprise systems, and deploys within weeks rather than months.
On competition, Sarrafi adds, “While many existing solutions focus on simple automation or incremental improvements, we have focused on solving the core challenge: scalability. Our technology dramatically reduces the need for bespoke development of AI agents or custom automation tools. Kovant enables companies to deploy teams of autonomous agents that can run end-to-end operations under human oversight.
Unlike systems where AI is locked within a specific SaaS product, Kovant allows organisations to orchestrate multiple agent teams across the entire value chain, from sourcing and manufacturing through to sales and delivery. Instead of building custom solutions, companies define job descriptions and team missions as blueprints, and Kovant agents execute the operations.”
What about diversity?
On diversity, Sarrafi notes, “Our initial team is built of 9 different nationalities, with 30% of the team being women. Our talent brings experience from leading technology scale-ups such as Spotify, Meta, Amazon, Google and OpenAI, as well as established enterprise environments including Bosch. We also have colleagues with medtech and research backgrounds, giving us a particularly diverse mix of perspectives and expertise”
What’s next?
With recent funding secured, Kovant intends to expand its global footprint beyond the Nordics, including into Switzerland and the Benelux region. The company aims to lead the shift toward agentic-first enterprise operations, demonstrating measurable profit-and-loss improvements without the need for protracted transformation projects.
Sarrafi concludes, “Over the next three years, our goal is for Kovant to become the leading agentic AI operating system for large enterprises across Europe and North America, expanding globally within five years. Our ambition is to help customers run up to 90% of their middle-office operations on an agentic stack with human oversight, making them up to 100x more efficient and significantly more competitive in their markets.”
Emmet King, Founding Partner at J12, adds, “Kovant is one of the first teams we have seen with a credible path to change this and drive real, scalable impact on enterprise operations. The team has fantastic prior experience in building data products and data infrastructure in large companies, as well as transforming enterprises with AI, and they are moving with rare speed and precision, already shaping how enterprises operationalise AI and gain huge value from it”
