Arrakis, a seven-month old London- and Paris-based startup building what it calls an AI “operating system” for industrial companies, is emerging from stealth with $38 million in venture capital funding. It says its goal is to bring agentic AI to sectors such aerospace, energy, logistics, and manufacturing.The company’s latest funding is a $30 million Series A led by Blossom Capital, with participation from venture capital firms Accel, GFC, MainObject, and Rerail. Accel led an earlier $7.5 million seed round, and individual backers include Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel and OpenAI’s head of business products, Olivier Godement.The latest round values the company at $140 million post-money, cofounder and CEO Rafael Quintanilla told Fortune.Quintanilla is a former vice president at Accel. While there, he spent the better part of a year crisscrossing the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East to develop the firm’s thesis on defense and industrial resilience. What he found convinced him to quit and become a founder himself.
“I realized that there was a huge gap between what I was seeing at Accel and in the Valley, with us investing in companies like Anthropic and Lovable in Europe,” he said, “and what I was seeing in the more industrial parts of the economy.”He said that most AI has targeted so-called knowledge workers who complete their jobs using software, but that many more jobs in the economy involve the production and movement of physical goods. “Most AI investment to date has targeted the 30% of workers behind a desk. The real ROI lies in the 70% running industrial operations,” he said.
