London’s Arrakis raises £22m to put AI on the factory floor

TL;DR:

• Arrakis, an AI deployment company based in London and Paris, has raised £22m ($30m) in Series A funding led by Blossom Capital, with Accel returning.
• Founded in January 2026 by former Accel investor Rafael Quintanilla, it installs AI agents into core operations across aerospace, energy, logistics and manufacturing.
• It claims early customers, including NYSE-listed firms, have cut procurement cycle times by up to 90%.

Arrakis has raised £22m ($30m) to build what it calls an operating system for industrial companies, deploying custom AI agents into mission-critical workflows. The round, led by Blossom Capital with backing from Accel and technology founders including Datadog’s Olivier Pomel, follows a $7.5m seed and lands just six months after the company was founded.

Aiming at the 70%

The pitch is a deliberate contrast with the prevailing direction of AI investment. “Most AI investment to date has targeted the 30% of workers behind a desk,” said Quintanilla. “The real ROI lies in the 70% running industrial operations.” Arrakis says it combines embedded AI engineers with a model-agnostic platform and applied research tuned to industrial settings, deploying agents into existing systems rather than forcing multi-year migrations. It also ties a share of its fees to customer outcomes.

The founding team draws on Palantir, Revolut, Datadog and ASML, and Arrakis frames its mission around Western reindustrialisation — “building from Europe for the world”. Early customers span energy, logistics and industrial sectors, with the company claiming measurable returns within weeks.

A European industrial-AI bet

For UK and European readers, the raise is a signal about where AI value might accrue next. Physical-economy AI is harder to deploy than desk-bound copilots but potentially stickier, and Arrakis is one of several well-funded European attempts to claim it. It joins a busy stretch of UK and European AI funding, from Cambridge’s CuspAI raising £338m to a wave of applied-AI start-ups, and speaks to the same reindustrialisation agenda animating UK industrial strategy.

Looking forward

Arrakis will use the money to triple headcount and expand across Europe, the US and the Middle East. The claims — 90% faster procurement cycles, returns in weeks — are the company’s own, and the test is whether outcome-linked pricing survives contact with the messy realities of heavy industry, where deployments rarely move at software speed.