Europe’s agent scene grows

Europe’s artificial intelligence agent boom is starting to look less like a race to build one giant brain and more like a rush to build thousands of very specific co-workers. In Europe alone, investors put €6.2 billion into artificial intelligence agent startups in 2025 across 429 deals, according to Sifted’s latest tally. (sifted.eu) That deal count matters because 429 bets is not a story about one or two mega-rounds. It is a story about venture capital firms spreading money across a wide field of companies that each automate one narrow job inside a business. (sifted.eu) An artificial intelligence agent is software that does more than answer a question once. It takes a goal like “improve this ad campaign” or “book these meetings,” pulls in data, makes choices, and keeps working through steps on its own. (sifted.eu) The first wave of excitement centered on United States model makers building huge general-purpose systems. The European pitch now looks different: take one messy workflow inside sales, law, finance, or marketing, and build software that acts like a junior analyst who never stops checking the dashboard. (sifted.eu) You can see that shift in Pomo, a new startup focused on marketing decisions rather than general artificial intelligence. Business Insider reported on April 8, 2026 that Pomo raised $4.5 million in seed funding to help companies fine-tune ads and react faster to competitors. (businessinsider.com) Pomo’s founders are not selling a chatbot for marketers to play with. They are pitching a system that watches campaign data, spots changes, and recommends what to do next when ad prices, rivals, and customer behavior move at the same time. (businessinsider.com) That is the part investors keep backing: software that turns a flood of business data into a small number of actions. In Pomo’s case, the company says marketing teams face a “decision crisis,” because they have too many channels, too many metrics, and too little time to test every move by hand. (businessinsider.com; tmcnet.com) Europe has an opening here because it does not need to outspend the biggest United States labs on giant foundation models to win these markets. A startup in London, Paris, Berlin, or Stockholm can build on existing models and compete by knowing one industry’s rules, data, and bottlenecks better than anyone else. (sifted.eu) That is why a continent known for specialized business software is suddenly producing so many agent startups. The money says investors think the next valuable artificial intelligence company may not be the one that knows everything, but the one that can reliably do one expensive office task better than a human team with six browser tabs open. (sifted.eu; businessinsider.com)