AI agents — tools that use the tech to perform tasks without needing a human in the loop — could be the big startup hype bubble in 2025.
Many VCs tell Sifted they're looking to deploy capital into AI agent startups this year, as companies hit the market with tech claiming to automate whole workflows and make companies more efficient.
Silicon Valley is also champing at the bit. In January, OpenAI’s Sam Altman predicted that the first AI agents will “materially change the output of companies” this year. Half of Y Combinator’s most recent list of startups it wants to see pitched in 2025 were for companies building the tech.
But which European AI agent startups have investors got their eyes on?
Sifted spoke to VCs at Join Capital, Octopus Ventures, HV Capital, Runa Capital, Episode 1, Teachers Venture Growth and Kinnevik to find out their non-portfolio picks.
Julia Flaig, principal at Join Capital
Maki People — France
Maki, a conversational HR agent specialising in talent acquisition, streamlines the hiring process with AI-driven skills tests and bias-free data analysis tools. By enabling organisations to make faster, data-driven hiring decisions, Maki improves both time-to-hire and candidate experience. The startup counts the likes of H&M, BNP Paribas, PwC and Capgemini as customers.
Spleenlab — Germany
Spleenlab develops AI perception software for semi and fully autonomous mobility, allowing automated drones, cars and aircraft to navigate safely. The company is demonstrating the potential of agentic AI within the evolving AI-driven mobility landscape as autonomy continues to advance.
Cognigy — Germany
Cognigy's AI platform allows enterprises to build and manage advanced AI agents for customer service. It uses conversational and generative AI to deploy pre-trained agents that can handle large volumes of customer requests. The no-code solution offers deep integrations with an enterprise’s own systems, high customisability and security and compliance.
Adam Said, principal at Octopus Ventures
DeepOpinion — Austria
DeepOpinion is automating complex business processes with AI agents. Its AI agents learn and adapt to changing situations, making them more efficient and effective at automating tasks that traditionally require human expertise. This horizontal approach has the potential to streamline operations and increase productivity across a wide range of use cases.
Unique — Switzerland
Unique is deploying AI agents in the financial services sector for tasks like due diligence, policy summaries, IT support and contract analysis. This vertical approach unlocks AI's potential to address specific business pain points and optimise workflows within the financial industry. We are likely to see many businesses with a similar model to Unique, targeting dozens of industry specific use cases all under one roof.
Manal Belaouane, principal at HV Capital
Lovable — Sweden
Lovable is building a platform that allows users to create and refine interactive web applications using natural language. Its flagship product, GPT Engineer, generates production-ready code, enabling users to build websites and web apps simply by describing desired features. By leveraging AI-driven agents, Lovable transforms software development into a conversational experience, making coding accessible to everyone without requiring technical expertise.
Parloa — Germany
Parloa is developing an AI-driven voice and chat automation platform for customer service operations. Its solution enhances call centre efficiency by combining conversational AI with human-like interactions. Parloa focuses on improving customer experience while reducing operational costs for large enterprises.
Synthesia — UK
Synthesia is developing AI-powered tools to generate high-quality, synthetic video content with lifelike avatars and voices. Its platform enables users to create professional videos by simply typing a script, eliminating the need for costly cameras, actors or studios. Synthesia is widely used for corporate training, marketing and content localisation, offering a scalable and cost-effective alternative to traditional video production.
ElevenLabs — UK and US
ElevenLabs is developing state-of-the-art AI voice synthesis technology that enables hyper-realistic, expressive speech generation. With advanced voice cloning and multilingual capabilities, its models are setting new standards in audio AI.
Denny Gabriel, associate at Runa Capital
H Company — France
The Paris-based AI startup is focused on developing agentic AI systems designed to automate complex workflows and tasks. H’s flagship product, Runner H, is a cloud-based web agent launched in November 2024 that uses proprietary vision-language models and has outperformed models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Computer Use Agent product while also being cheaper.
Nevermined — Switzerland
Nevermined is a Swiss-based decentralised AI payments protocol focused on enabling payments between agents themselves, positioning itself as the "PayPal for AI”. What is most innovative here is that Nevermined enables autonomous negotiation and real-time payments between AI agents.
Juna.ai — Germany
Juna is a Berlin-based AI startup focused on optimising industrial manufacturing processes through autonomous AI agents. Managing an industrial plant is expensive and time consuming, but Juna's agent can understand live sensor data (temperature, pressure, velocity) and historical production records to make decisions faster. This allows the agents to independently perform critical tasks like temperature regulation in chemical reactors, combustion process optimisation or even cooling system fine-tuning. While most AI agentic solutions we’ve seen sprouting over the past months are focused on digital use cases, Juna is deploying agents that directly interact with physical processes.
Adam Shuaib, partner at Episode 1
Horizing — UK
Horizing is building AI agents for compliance, with a particular focus on understanding upcoming regulatory changes and how they might impact business. It's very early stage but the startup already has some pilot users — and current customer needs are not being met by existing solutions.
Novee — UK
Novee is working on agents to automate workflows for insurance underwriters, who lose out on revenue due to the complexities associated with efficiently conducting due diligence on underwriting opportunities in a timely manner. The team already has some exciting pilots about to kick off with large insurers, and we think its product can scale very efficiently.
Zaya Kadyrova, director at Teachers’ Venture Growth
Pigment — France
Pigment is an AI-powered business planning platform enabling organisations to model business strategies in real-time. Its platform integrates financial, operational and workforce data to deliver actionable insights and scenario planning. Pigment exemplifies a company with intimate knowledge of finance and operational workflows, now expertly automating them with AI.
CausaLens — UK
CausaLens builds AI data scientist agents that automate and enhance data science workflows. The startup deeply understands and automates data scientists' workflows enables faster, more informed decision-making. With explainable AI solutions, CausaLens is transforming how businesses leverage AI for strategic planning, enabling them to tackle complex data challenges across industries, from finance to healthcare.
Charles Martin, investor at Kinnevik
Convergence — UK
Convergence is a personal AI agent for a range of unique administrative tasks. I have personally used it across several research tasks and like the way it allows the agent to interact with an internet browser on your behalf.
Zero — Finland
Zero is a go-to-market platform which uses AI agents to automate a lot of the discovery work for lead generation. More broadly I think its focus on data foundations allows for much more reliable automation, increasing productivity around many of the cumbersome manual workflows that exist around CRMs.
