Dust, the Paris-based scaleup helping businesses build AI agents, has closed a $40m Series B round, bringing total funding raised to more than $60m.
The fundraise was co-led by VC giant Sequoia and San Francisco-based firm Abstract, with participation from US cloud companies Datadog and Snowflake.
Launched in 2022 by two alumni from payments giant Stripe, Gabriel Hubert and Stanislas Polu, the latter of whom also spent three years as a software engineer at OpenAI, Dust has fast become one of the buzziest AI startups in the French capital.
The company has developed a platform via which businesses’ teams can build AI agents and deploy them inside a shared workspace, where they can access a range of tools and resources across different enterprise functions, and work collaboratively with all employees.
Hubert says the objective is to improve current enterprise deployments of the technology, in which each individual employee relies on their own AI assistant.
“We call this approach single-player AI, where there is one agent per person,” says Hubert. “That’s the default level of AI adoption for most companies today.”
“We’re building a different type of system… where agents aren't isolated assistants running separate conversations with each employee.
“They participate in the same workflows as the rest of the team, and when one agent improves, the benefit extends across the organisation rather than staying locked in one person's setup.”
Enterprise deployment
Dust says it serves 3,000 organisations, which represent 300k agents deployed in total across the platform.
Customers include European tech-native companies like French neobank Qonto, insurtech Alan and fintech Pennylane, as well as UK-based healthtech Causaly and billing platform Paddle. Hubert says Dust has also seen some traction with non AI-native enterprises in the 500-10k employees range.
The US is the scaleup’s fastest-growing market, according to Hubert, with customers including Datadog and password manager 1Password.
Earlier this year Dust crossed $20m in annual recurring revenues (ARR), a significant jump from two years ago, when it hit €1m in ARR. The startup is not profitable.
“Profitability is not what we’re optimising for in the near term,” he says. “The raise is about acceleration, not survival.”
The Series B funding will enable Dust to invest more into research and development (R&D) and growth in the US.
“Our largest enterprise deployments are at American companies, and those companies are running their teams on Dust every day, not running a proof of concept,” says Hubert.
“The US is where the enterprise AI category is going to be decided, and we're competing there as a full participant.”
