Magentic raises $18M Series A for AI agents in procurement
Fourteen months after founding, London's Magentic lands an $18M Series A from Felicis and Sequoia to send AI agents into the buy side of global manufacturing.
Also see more funding coverage: /category/funding/
London, United Kingdom
London’s Magentic has raised an $18M Series A led by Felicis, with Sequoia Capital and The Westly Group returning, to put autonomous AI agents to work inside manufacturers’ procurement and supply chains.
Agentic AI has a credibility problem – every demo looks flawless until the agent meets a real purchase order, a grumpy supplier and an ERP from 2009. And yet the investors who saw this category earliest keep writing bigger cheques into the teams that survive contact with the factory floor. Below, I lay out the round, the company behind it, the market it sells into, and what a Felicis-led ticket into London tells us about where applied AI is heading.
Fourteen months from founding to a Felicis-led Series A
Magentic announced the $18M Series A on 17 September 2026, led by Felicis with participation from Sequoia Capital and The Westly Group (company announcement, 17 Sep 2026). Both participants are existing backers: they joined the company’s $5.5M seed in July 2025 alongside First Momentum Ventures and angel investors from SAP, Airbus, McKinsey and Hugging Face (Tech Funding News, 17 Sep 2026). Total raised now stands at $23.5M, fourteen months after the company was founded.
The new capital will, in the company’s words, “accelerate Magentic’s roadmap for AI agents, extend coverage across procurement and supply chain workflows, and deepen the long-horizon AI research that lets agents tackle the most complex optimization problems.”
“Supply chains decide what gets built and what does not,” said Felicis partner Feyza Haskaraman in the announcement, adding that “getting an agent to understand complex systems well enough to take autonomous action is no small feat.”
Digital workers inside Teams, email and the ERP
What does Magentic actually sell? Not a dashboard. The company builds what it calls digital workers – multi-agent systems that operate inside a manufacturer’s existing tools, from Microsoft Teams and email to the ERP itself, handling supplier selection, contract negotiation, order management and invoice processing without asking anyone to change systems.
Founded in July 2025 by Robin Van Aeken (CEO, previously a supply chain consultant at McKinsey and an OpenAI alumnus) and Odhran O’Donoghue (CTO, a machine learning PhD with stints at OpenAI, NASA and the Crick Institute), the company is headquartered in London with a second base in New York (company announcement, 17 Sep 2026).
The traction numbers, all company-reported, are unusually concrete for a business this young: customers include Global 500 manufacturers, among them three of the world’s ten largest beverage producers; one customer processes over 1 million purchase orders a year through the platform; another identified $4M in savings its human teams had overlooked. Magentic cites typical results of 2-5% cost savings and a 60% improvement in data quality. The full profile is on Magentic’s startup record.
A $9.84bn software category growing at 9.83%
Procurement software is a market worth USD 9.84bn in 2026, forecast to reach USD 22.88bn by 2035 at a 9.83% CAGR (Precedence Research, 2026-2035 forecast). A single-digit growth rate sounds sleepy next to AI headlines, but that is precisely the point: this is an installed, unavoidable category – every manufacturer buys things – being repriced by agents that touch spend directly rather than reporting on it after the fact.
For scale, look at this same week in our fundraising database: Bucharest’s Veridion raised a $20M Series A for supplier and business data, and London’s Jack & Jill landed a $40M Series A for AI hiring agents. Magentic’s $18M sits squarely in the band European agentic AI companies are commanding at Series A right now – and notably, it was raised on 2-5% savings claims against budgets measured in billions.
Two US tier-1s, one London cap table
The pattern worth watching here is not the amount; it is the cap table. Felicis leading, Sequoia doubling down from the seed, The Westly Group returning: that is three US investors competing to fund a fourteen-month-old London company whose product lives in factories, not feeds. We keep hearing that American capital only crosses the Atlantic for foundation models. The fact is it also crosses for boring, enormous problems – and industrial procurement is as boring and enormous as they come.
The good news is that this plays to our strengths. Europe does not have the biggest models, but we have the factories, the SAP installations and the supply chain operators the agents have to learn from – the same reason angels from SAP and Airbus were on Magentic’s seed. Teams that pair frontier-lab research credentials with unglamorous industrial workflows are exactly what European ecosystems produce well, from London to Munich to Eindhoven.
What to watch next: whether Magentic’s agents expand from procurement into planning and logistics, and whether the next round in this category lands from a European growth fund or, once again, from Sand Hill Road. Watching who funds the companies that automate our industrial base is not a detail – it is the whole game. The opportunity is clear.
