Ares Intelligence raises €2.6M to show firms where AI pays off
London's Ares Intelligence raised €2.6M from Creandum and Lakestar, two backers of its founders' last company, to scale an AI interviewer that tells leadership where AI pays off.
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London, United Kingdom
London-based Ares Intelligence has raised €2.6M from Creandum and Lakestar, with angels connected to Google DeepMind, to scale an AI interviewer that tells leadership teams where AI will save them time and money.
Europe has no shortage of AI tools and a real shortage of companies that know where to put them. Ares Intelligence is betting that the fastest way to find out is to ask the people doing the work.
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Creandum and Lakestar back the Instruct founders again
Ares Intelligence raised €2.6M, EU-Startups reported in an exclusive on 30 October 2026. The round was backed by Creandum and Lakestar, with participation from angels connected to Google DeepMind, according to TheSaaSNews on the same day. Neither report gives the round a stage label. Startupmag’s UK funding report for 26-30 October 2026 lists the raise at £2.5M; we quote the figure from the EU-Startups exclusive.
The company, founded in London in 2026, plans to use the capital to expand its operations and take its workforce intelligence platform to more businesses across Europe and the United States, TheSaaSNews reported.
Both investors know the founders well. CEO Matt Falconer and CTO Alfie Ranstead previously co-founded Instruct, a workflow automation platform that Creandum announced backing in October 2025, BM Magazine reported on 7 October 2026, and that Lakestar also backed, according to the Ares website.
An AI interviewer that talks to every employee
Ares describes itself as an organizational intelligence company. Its AI interviewer runs confidential voice conversations with employees, according to TheSaaSNews, and BM Magazine describes 20-minute sessions with live notes shared on screen. TheSaaSNews adds that the interviews are multilingual and that leadership receives a prioritized, evidence-based roadmap of where AI saves time and money within weeks.
The idea came out of Instruct, whose clients wanted to automate parts of their business and did not know where to start, Startups Españolas reported. According to BM Magazine, Falconer joined IBM as a software engineer at 18 and later ran discovery workshops for Automation Anywhere across Australia, India and Europe. He told the magazine that most companies know they need to do something with AI and do not know where to start. Consulting firms have sold workshops about AI for years. Ares wants the AI to run the workshop.
The privacy layer is part of the product. The company says the platform is GDPR and SOC 2 compliant, can mask names, redact voices or strip role metadata, and deploys in the EU or the US. Its stated buyers are private equity firms working on portfolio value creation, and consultancies. BM Magazine also reports that the two founders have won hackathons hosted by Anthropic and Meta.
A $9.65bn advisory market growing 25.6% a year
AI consulting services were worth $9.65bn worldwide in 2025 and are forecast to reach $73.89bn by 2034, a 25.6% CAGR over 2026-2034, according to Fortune Business Insights (report updated 12 October 2026). The same report puts the UK at $0.73bn in 2026, about 6.1% of global revenue, and Germany at $0.65bn. Ares is going after that budget, the fees companies pay advisers to tell them where AI fits.
The growth rate matters more than the base. At 25.6% a year a market roughly doubles every three years, which leaves room for a newcomer that sells speed to buyers who are already spending.
Among the rounds Sesamers has covered, €2.6M sits in the usual band for early-stage enterprise AI in Europe. Plinto raised €2.9M at pre-seed on 20 October 2026, co-led by People Ventures and Emblem, while Ravical raised $17M at seed on 29 October 2026, led by MMC Ventures. More rounds in the segment sit in our fundraising data and on the applied AI and agents desk.
London’s bet on the map before the agents
Repeat backing is the clearest signal in this deal. Creandum and Lakestar both wrote checks into Instruct, and both came back for the same two founders’ next company within about a year. At the earliest stage, a second check from investors who have already worked with a team carries more information than any pitch deck.
The second signal is where Ares sits in the stack. Most of the enterprise AI rounds we have covered recently, Plinto and Ravical among them, fund the tool that does the work. Ares funds the step before it, the diagnosis of which work is worth handing to a machine. If that diagnosis becomes a step before AI licences are signed, budgets would follow the hours employees report losing.
Will consultancies buy a tool that shortens their own engagements? Their answer will shape the next round. What I will be watching is whether private equity firms roll Ares out across whole portfolios, where a 20-minute interview becomes a repeatable diagnostic for dozens of companies, and whether the planned push into the United States keeps the team’s center of gravity in London.
Europe has spent years debating how fast its companies adopt AI. Two founders from London think the quickest answer is a conversation with the people doing the work.
