The Pulse
Magentic Raises $18 Million for Industrial AI Workers
Magentic has raised an $18 million Series A led by Felicis to expand AI workers for procurement and supply-chain operations at large manufacturers. The London- and New York-based company says its agents already manage more than one million
AI.info Team ·
“The companies that build the best intelligence into every decision they make will be the ones that compound their competitive advantage.”
Robin Van Aeken, CEO and co-founder of Magentic
Felicis Leads Magentic’s $18 Million Series A
Magentic, a London- and New York-based company building AI digital workers for industrial operations, has raised $18 million in Series A funding. Felicis led the round, with existing investors Sequoia Capital and The Westly Group also participating.
The company announced the financing on September 17, 2026, roughly a year after its launch. Magentic says the new capital will expand its agents across procurement and supply-chain workflows while supporting longer-horizon research into complex optimization problems.
Van Aeken and CTO and co-founder Odhran O’Donoghue founded Magentic after careers connected to McKinsey and OpenAI. The company launched in July 2025 with a $5.5 million funding round and now sells what it calls “digital workers” rather than another dashboard for enterprise teams.
From Supplier Selection to Invoice Clearance
Magentic’s systems operate inside software that manufacturers already use, including Microsoft Teams, email and internal enterprise systems. The company describes them as multi-agent systems that can take responsibility for a workflow from beginning to end, with people retaining oversight.
The tasks span decisions about whether to buy or build, supplier selection, contract negotiation, order management and invoice clearance. Magentic says its agents handle both indirect spending and direct spending on raw materials, where procurement decisions can affect production schedules and product costs.
That approach sets the company apart from procurement tools focused on recommendations or isolated workflow steps. Magentic is attempting to place AI workers inside fragmented environments that may include billions of rows of data, tens of billions of dollars in spending and older enterprise-resource-planning systems supported by spreadsheets.
Customers Put the Agents Into Production
Magentic says one customer now processes more than one million orders each year through its AI agents. Another customer has found $4 million in savings after deploying the system.
Across its customer base, which includes companies in the Global 500 and three of the world’s ten largest beverage companies, Magentic says it typically delivers savings of 2% to 5%, improves data quality by 60% and cuts tens of thousands of hours of manual work.
Those figures are company-reported performance claims rather than independently audited results. The company says the freed time allows procurement staff to focus on supplier relationships, product innovation and strategy instead of repetitive administrative work.
Industrial Spending Creates a Large Target
Magentic is pitching its product into a period of heavy investment in physical infrastructure. The company cites a Goldman Sachs projection of roughly $8 trillion in AI capital spending between 2026 and 2031, much of it directed toward infrastructure that must be sourced, manufactured and built.
It also says procurement workloads have grown by about 10% year over year while budgets have increased by about 1%. Tariffs, manufacturing demand and constrained spending are adding pressure to teams responsible for finding suppliers, enforcing contracts and keeping orders moving.
“Supply chains are the least glamorous part of the economy, yet the most consequential, deciding what gets built and what does not,” said Feyza Haskaraman, a partner at Felicis. “Getting an agent to understand a manufacturer's complex systems well enough to take action inside them is no small feat, which is why we haven't seen anyone else build autonomous AI workers for the physical economy.”
Security Controls Become Part of the Product
Industrial companies are often reluctant to give software agents access to procurement records, supplier communications and financial systems. Magentic says it supports zero-data-retention agreements with major AI providers, deployment in any cloud environment and isolated deployments in any data region.
The company’s CTO says the technical challenge extends beyond generating responses from documents. “We’re building AI that can diagnose problems, plan the fixes, take action, and see the work through across terabytes of multimodal data at once,” O’Donoghue said.
Magentic plans to use the Series A funding to broaden its coverage of procurement and supply-chain processes. Its bet is that manufacturers will adopt AI workers not as general-purpose assistants, but as systems responsible for specific operational outcomes inside the software and data their employees already depend on.