While most agent startups chase email and spreadsheets, Arrakis is aiming at factory floors and flight lines. The London- and Paris-based company emerged from stealth on July 22 with roughly $38 million — a $30 million Series A led by Blossom Capital stacked on an Accel-led $7.5 million seed closed in March — at a $140 million post-money valuation, Fortune reported exclusively.
The thesis
Founder-CEO Rafael Quintanilla, a former Accel investor, argues AI's biggest economic payoff sits in industrial sectors, not office work. Arrakis builds an operating layer that deploys AI agents into mission-critical operations — aerospace, energy, logistics and manufacturing — where errors cost real money and downtime is measured in millions.
The team
Co-founders Haroun Beltaifa and Romain Fouilland come from Palantir, Mikhail Galkov from Delivery Hero — a forward-deployed DNA that matches the sell-into-industry playbook. The company runs about 15 people and plans to triple headcount, expanding to New York and the Middle East.
The believers
Angels include Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog, and Olivier Godement, OpenAI's head of business products, alongside Cambridge Aerospace founder Junaid Hussein. Blossom's conviction: industrial AI is where Europe can actually win.
The approach
Arrakis is model-agnostic — orchestrating OpenAI, Anthropic and open-source models rather than training its own — and already counts five customers roughly seven months after its January founding. The Series A drew participation from Accel, GFC, MainObject and Rerail on top of Blossom's lead — an unusually crowded cap table for a company this young, and a signal of how contested the industrial-agent thesis has become among European funds.