Orq.ai raises 5 million euros in seed round

The Dutch AI startup Orq.ai has raised 5 million euros in a seed financing round. The round was led by seed + speed Ventures and Galion.exe, supported by other investors such as Curiosity VC, Spacetime, XO Ventures, xdeck ventures, Waves Capital and GoldenEggCheck. Orq.ai has now received a total of 7.3 million euros in capital since its foundation in 2022.

Focus on scaling and market expansion

Orq.ai plans to use the new capital to expand its team of currently 25 employees in the areas of technology, sales and customer success. It also plans to strengthen its presence in key European markets and accelerate growth in North America. Strategic advisors and angel investors such as Sam Bourton (QuantumBlack/McKinsey), Adriaan Mol (Mollie) and Daniel Gebler (Picnic) will also support the startup in the future.

Growing compliance requirements increase demand

Stricter European data protection and AI regulations, in particular GDPR and the upcoming EU AI law, are increasing the pressure on companies to deploy secure and fully controllable AI infrastructures. Development teams increasingly need solutions that go beyond simple demos and enable productive applications.

Orq.ai addresses this demand with a platform that provides a unified control layer across the entire lifecycle of AI agents; from development to testing to monitoring in production. Customers already include Afas, MoneyBird, Keyrus and Helloprint.

Closing the production gap in AI

According to Orq.ai, many companies fail to reliably transfer AI prototypes into productive systems. Monitoring, governance and automated processes are often lacking. This is precisely where the platform comes in and is designed to help companies ensure stability, compliance and scalability.

Development teams not only need more models, but also the infrastructure to industrialize the creation, improvement and deployment of agents

Sohrab Hosseini, Co-Founder Orq.ai

Co-founder Sohrab Hosseini emphasizes that teams not only need models, but also a robust infrastructure to industrialize the development and deployment of agents. Orq.ai aims to provide this transparency and control.

End-to-end platform instead of individual solutions

Orq.ai takes a holistic approach and combines several core functions in one platform:

• Agent Runtime for reproducible and verifiable processes
• AI gateway with access to over 300 models from 17 providers
• Experimentation and simulation functions for LLMs and agents
• Evaluation and monitoring for quality, costs and compliance
• Integration of knowledge databases
• Deployment in the cloud, hybrid or on-premises

This approach is expected to reduce development time by up to 67% while saving over 10% of engineering resources.

Data sovereignty as a competitive advantage

Orq.ai's architecture enables companies to operate AI systems entirely on their own infrastructure. This facilitates compliance with data residency requirements. US customers also benefit from this flexibility.

Positioning as the new standard control layer

With the increasing spread of agent-based AI systems, Orq.ai sees itself as the central control layer for their operation on a large scale. The redesigned platform and a complete rebranding are intended to underline this focus. According to the company, over 100 organizations are now using the solution.

AI agents are becoming a fundamental component of enterprise and B2B software, similar to cloud infrastructure in the last technology cycle. Companies need a reliable way to coordinate, control and scale these agents across all operations.

Alexander Kölpin, Managing Director seed + speed Ventures

Investors such as Alexander Kölpin (seed + speed Ventures) and Kevin Kuipers (Galion.exe) see Orq.ai as a key technology for reliably integrating AI agents into company processes and significantly shortening development cycles.