A group of entrepreneurs who have traveled around the world to launch businesses in the UK have raised £2.44 million for AI startups.
The founding team of Archestra's Matvey Kukuy (CEO), Ildar Iskhakov (CTO) and engineer Joey Orlando moved from Singapore, Israel and Canada respectively to launch the company in the UK.
Kukuy and Iskhakov are childhood friends and previously founded the incident management platform Amixr and appeared on Grafana in 2021.
The trio developed a A platform that allows businesses to safely use AI agents and connect securely to internal data sources.
The open source platform does this by introducing a security layer that allows businesses to safely adopt the latest advances in AI, including the “Model Context Protocol” (MCP).
MCP was announced in November by AI company Humanity and is a framework that makes it easy to connect large-scale language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT with proprietary systems and data sources such as Slack, email and HR platforms.
The London-based business will develop this platform to leverage the fast-growing integrated platform (IPAAS) market, which is projected to exceed $17 billion in revenue by 2028.
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Concept Ventures led the round, joining Zero Prime Venture, Celero Venture, RTP Global, Aronique and many angel investors.
“The MCP is unlocking the new frontier of AI agents, but MCP is currently completely inappropriate for businesses,” Kukuy said.
“We're building a security-first solution that will change this. An open source platform means that whether you're an engineer or a HR person, you can safely and impact your workflow, whether you're an engineer or a HR person, without increasing risk.
“The speed we are moving reflects how passionate we are for this solution and the impact it has on the market.”
Ariel Rahamim, principal of Concept Ventures, added: “Just as APIs have become the foundational building blocks of Internet infrastructure, MCPs are emerging as connective tissue to improve the context layer of AI tools within the enterprise.
“Archestra is building the infrastructure layer that this ecosystem needs. The concept relies on the team's technical depth, open source DNA and execution strength to grow into a leader in the category.
“The team is attacking mission-critical issues they lived in directly. They are confident that they define how companies deploy and manage AI contexts at scale.”
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