Digital workers for the physical world: funding will grow Magentic's AI agents into a full AI workforce for global manufacturers

LONDON, Sept. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Magentic, which provides AI digital workers for operations at large industrial companies, today announced an $18 million Series A. The round was raised a year after launch and led by Felicis, alongside existing investors Sequoia Capital and The Westly Group. Founded by McKinsey and OpenAI alumni, Magentic is leading the deployment of AI agents for the world's largest manufacturers.

"The physical world is dealing with the biggest capex cycle in history, driven by AI demand, during a time of trade disruption and geopolitical challenges," said Robin Van Aeken, CEO and co-founder of Magentic. "The companies that build the best intelligence into every decision they make will be the ones that compound their competitive advantage."

The funding arrives as industrial and procurement teams face converging pressures from manufacturing demand, tariffs, and limited budget. Goldman Sachs projects roughly $8 trillion in AI capital spending between 2026 and 2031, much of it flowing into physical infrastructure that has to be sourced and built. Procurement workloads have grown roughly 10% year over year against just 1% budget growth.

AI digital workers for operations

Magentic's AI digital workers are multi-agent systems that operate like virtual employees, working continuously inside the world's largest manufacturers. This AI workforce works the way people do: on Microsoft Teams, on email, and inside a company's own systems. They can take over work and own it end to end: deciding whether to buy or build, choosing the right supplier, negotiating contracts, running orders, and clearing invoices. Built for a scale only the world's largest manufacturers face in billions of rows of data, tens of billions in spend, and decades-old fragmented systems still held together by Excel and aging ERPs, a single digital worker grows into a workforce spanning operations, with people always in command.

Magentic supports both indirect and direct spend. This includes the raw materials that go into products, where the most complex and valuable challenges lie. One customer now runs more than a million orders a year through Magentic AI agents; at another, they've already found $4 million in savings. Across a base of the Global 500, including three of the world's ten largest beverage companies, Magentic typically delivers 2-5% savings, a 60% lift in data quality, and reduces tens of thousands of hours of manual work. This frees people to focus on partnering with suppliers, new product innovation, and strategy. Magentic sees human procurement teams growing bigger as their value per person goes up in the future.

"Supply chains are the least glamorous part of the economy, yet the most consequential, deciding what gets built and what does not. That's also what makes them so hard to automate," said Feyza Haskaraman, 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."

Scaling a secure AI workforce

With enterprise wary of AI agents acting inside critical systems, Magentic is built for demanding security bars. Controls include zero-data-retention agreements with major AI providers, deployment in any cloud environment, and secure, isolated deployments available in any data region.

The new funding will accelerate Magentic's roadmap for AI agents, extend coverage across procurement and supply chain workflows, and deepen the long-horizon AI research that lets agents tackle the most complex optimization problems in procurement and supply chains.

"Bringing frontier AI to the physical world requires pushing beyond AI systems with limited context windows. 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," said Odhran O'Donoghue, CTO and co-founder of Magentic.

About Magentic

Magentic provides AI digital workers, advanced multi-agent systems, that work alongside procurement and supply chain teams at global companies. Rather than adding another software dashboard, AI digital workers take action inside a company's own systems. Founded by Robin Van Aeken (CEO) and Odhran O'Donoghue (CTO), Magentic launched in July 2025, is based in London and New York, and is backed by Sequoia Capital, Felicis, and The Westly Group.

Media contact
media@magentic.com

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/magentic-raises-18m-to-build-the-ai-workforce-for-the-physical-world-302882360.html

Images

Tags

More Like This

Industrial workforce capacity gap being filled by agentic digital workers

Job&Talent raises EUR 92 million funding to accelerate AI-powered growth

NEURA Robotics Announces Record Series C of up to $1.4 Billion to Accelerate the World’s Leading Physical AI Platform

Neuranics Raises $8M to Revolutionise Magnetic Sensing for the Future of Human-Machine Interaction

Manhattan Associates Unveils Agentic AI Innovation at Momentum 2025

Hg extends collaboration with Anthropic to bring agentic AI capabilities across the portfolio

mimik and Tech Mahindra Unveil a Pioneering Agentic AI Production Center

UK SMES EMBRACE AI AMIDST INCREASING MANUFACTURING AND PROCUREMENT PRESSURES