Agentic AI Startups Secure Fresh Funding
Venture capital investment continues to flow into the AI infrastructure and automation sector. Adapt, a startup building an "AI computer for business," raised a $10M seed round. In the agentic automation space, Didero secured $30 million to automate supply chains, and Pactum raised a $54M Series C for agentic procurement.
- Pactum's Series C funding brings its total raised to over $100 million, with the company reporting a 489% increase in spend managed by its AI agents and a 2.5x increase in annual recurring revenue. Its client roster includes major enterprises such as Walmart, Honeywell, and Novartis. - Didero's $30 million Series A was co-led by Chemistry and Headline, with participation from Microsoft's M12 venture fund. The company aims to automate the 60-70% of a procurement team's time currently spent on manual tasks. - Adapt's $10 million seed round was co-led by Activant Capital and Headline. The company is developing a horizontal AI platform with features like "Adapt Apps," which turn AI outputs into persistent graphical user interfaces for creating tools and dashboards. - The agentic AI market is projected to grow significantly, with one forecast predicting an increase from $7.55 billion in 2025 to approximately $199.05 billion by 2034. This growth is driven by the technology's ability to automate complex, multi-step workflows without constant human oversight. - Didero's platform acts as an agentic AI layer on top of existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, integrating with communication channels like email to execute tasks without human intervention. The company plans to expand from core procurement into adjacent areas like sourcing and payments. - Pactum's AI agents have handled deals as large as $140.5 million and have negotiated and signed agreements in as little as 87 seconds. The platform is designed to let procurement professionals work alongside AI agents to free up time for more strategic work. - The investment trend in AI is shifting from a focus on infrastructure to a concentration on monetizable AI applications and software. Venture capital is increasingly flowing to a smaller number of dominant AI firms perceived as clear market leaders. - Enterprise adoption of agentic AI is still in its early stages, with a 2025 study indicating that while 61% of organizations were exploring the technology, only 2% had deployed it at scale. However, 74% of companies surveyed plan to deploy agentic AI within two years.
