We’ve joined Sequoia and Westly Group in backing Magentic, which is building enterprise-grade AI agents that autonomously recover millions in lost procurement value. Founded by a supply chain veteran and an ex-OpenAI engineer, Magentic blends industry insight with AI excellence.
Every year, billion-dollar industrial companies hemorrhage tens of millions of euros through broken procurement processes. Contracts go unenforced. Supplier negotiations remain untapped. Performance metrics scatter across systems like digital debris. The culprit? Procurement teams are drowning in data chaos, managing thousands of suppliers with legacy tools that can't keep pace.
This isn't just inefficiency, it's a $5 trillion global crisis hiding in plain sight.
We're excited to announce our investment in Magentic, a startup that's finally cracking this code, alongside lead investor Sequoia and Westly Group. They're building enterprise-grade AI agents that don't just analyze procurement data; they act on it autonomously, recovering millions of dollars in lost value while procurement teams are asleep.
Procurement in industrial enterprises is a complex nightmare; thousands of suppliers, contracts buried in PDFs, performance data scattered across legacy systems, and email chains. Procurement teams are often chronically understaffed and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data. The result? Even multi-billion-dollar companies routinely waste tens of millions of euros annually through missed contract enforcement, untapped negotiation opportunities, and overlooked supplier consolidation.
Magentic is ending this waste.
Their autonomous agents, called "Mages," operate like digital coworkers with superhuman capabilities. Their flagship agent, Sam, doesn't just detect contract breaches; it autonomously compares delivery data against contractual terms, flags violations, gathers evidence, and initiates enforcement actions, all the way through to the end. This enables procurement teams to recover millions in lost value at unprecedented speed and scale.
New agents are launched continuously, with the ambitious goal of covering the full spectrum of enterprise procurement workflows, including contract enforcement, supplier negotiations, consolidation, and ordering. These agents don't work in isolation; they collaborate with human employees, unlocking automation levels rarely seen in enterprise software. The result: millions in savings and procurement transformed from a cost center to a strategic margin driver.
An exceptional team with the perfect mix of domain knowledge and technical depth started Magentic. Robin Van Aeken brings hard-earned procurement intelligence from the trenches of McKinsey's supply chain and procurement practice. He has lived through the pain points of industrial enterprises daily, understanding not just what's broken, but exactly how to fix it at scale. Odhran O'Donoghue is an expert AI engineer, having worked at the forefront of agentic systems with OpenAI and throughout his PhD at the University of Oxford. He possesses the rare technical depth needed to architect enterprise-grade AI agents that operate effectively in the real world's complex and messy data environment.
This combination is lightning in a bottle: world-class domain knowledge paired with cutting-edge AI engineering. From our first meeting, we've been struck by their exceptional clarity of vision, deep technical insight, and surgical understanding of customer pain points. Building and deploying AI agents in large enterprises demands more than great technology; it requires pioneering agent-native go-to-market strategies, the ability to establish institutional trust from day one, and the ability to listen actively to your customers. We couldn't be more confident that this is the perfect team to execute their ambitious vision.
This is not your typical procurement SaaS tool. It's an entirely new paradigm of creating value with AI:
Magentic's product strategy makes its agents enterprise-ready from day one:
This creates a flywheel: faster deployment → visible savings → stickiness → expansion across more procurement workflows → increased cost savings for enterprise customers.
Global procurement spend runs in the trillions, and fraud or inefficiency eats up an estimated $5 trillion annually. Yet the software stack remains frozen in time. While procurement planning and spend analysis tools exist, the reactive side, enforcement, resolution, recovery, is under-served and under-automated. That's Magentic's massive wedge.
At First Momentum, we invest at the intersection of deep tech infrastructure and industrial applications, and Magentic fits that thesis perfectly. It's an AI-native product that delivers directly measurable ROI by transforming the procurement function in industrial enterprises.
AI agents have the potential to transform the core of how enterprises operate. Unlike countless SaaS tools that failed to change rigid workflows, Magentic's agents adapt to existing processes and do the work themselves, delivering high-quality output, not just another dashboard. This leads to immediate cost savings and significant efficiency gains.
We're still at the very beginning of the AI agent era, but Magentic presents a clear and compelling vision: eliminate repetitive work, enable humans to focus on high-value tasks, and bring structure to the chaotic world of enterprise procurement. Of all the AI agent startups we've reviewed so far, Magentic stood out by orders of magnitude, with a sharp vision, measurable impact from day one, and a clear path to deploying agents securely at enterprise-scale.
With perfect timing, a world-class founding team, agent-first product design, and impressive early traction, Magentic is one of the most compelling enterprise AI investments we've seen.
We're convinced Magentic can become the go-to agent platform for enterprise procurement, shifting billions in value from chaos to control.
.svg.webp){kind=logo}
