Sapiom is a San Francisco startup that sits between AI agents and the models they run on. It has raised a $35 million Series A. Dragonfly led the round. It comes 11 months after the company launched, and six months after a $15 million seed led by Accel. That takes total funding to $50 million.
The pitch is narrow and timely: make AI agents cheaper to run. At the moment an agent acts, Sapiom decides which model, tool, or service it may use. It enforces a budget before the money is spent. Its Router sends each call to the cheapest capable model, not the most expensive one. The platform has processed more than 270 million transactions since launching six months ago.
The bill that made the case
The clearest case is a customer named Polsia. The AI startup employs nobody, running swarms of agents to help operate other businesses. Its projected revenue jumped from $100,000 to $10 million in a year, Semafor reported. But its token bill climbed with it, hitting $1.2 million a month on Anthropic. After Sapiom ran a series of evaluations, that bill fell roughly tenfold, to about $100,000.
“It’s just unsustainable,” founder Ilan Zerbib told Semafor. He argues that startups cannot deploy at the prices frontier labs charge, even when the demand is there.
