Archestra, a platform which enables companies to securely use AI agents and connect them to internal data sources safely, has raised £2.5m pre-seed funding in a round led by Concept Ventures.
The oversubscribed raise, which closed in less than two weeks, was joined by Zero Prime Ventures, Celero Ventures, RTP Global and Aloniq. Angels include: Max Hauser (Managing Director & Partner BCG), Maxim Konovalov (Nginx co-founder), Konstantin Vinogradov (GP at Runa Capital), Stephen Whitworth (CEO of incident.io), and Luke Harries (Elevenlabs).
Archestra is the brainchild of serial founders and childhood friends Matvey Kukuy (CEO) and Ildar Iskhakov (CTO). They are joined by Founding Engineer Joey Orlando (ex-Grafana). Matvey and Ildar founded incident management platform Amixr, which exited to Grafana in 2021. Matvey went on to co-found AIOps platform Keep, which exited to Elastic.
Archestra enables every employee within an organisation – whether you’re an HR rep or a sales exec – to securely connect company data to AI. The open-source platform does this by introducing security layers that allow companies to safely adopt the latest advances in AI, including what’s called the “Model Context Protocol” (MCP).
The MCP was unveiled by AI company Anthropic in November. It’s a framework that makes it easier for people to connect Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT with their own systems and data sources, such as Slack, email or HR platforms. Connecting LLMs to data in this way enables AI to solve problems autonomously and more accurately – much like a human colleague. For example, it can draft emails, edit documents, build task lists, send Slack messages and find data stored on internal systems.
Enterprises see a major opportunity in connecting AI to their data. However, it currently presents a serious security and compliance challenge. For example, an AI agent with unfettered access to internal systems could scrape staff salary data and share it on LinkedIn. Or delete vital information from internal systems.
To avoid these nightmare scenarios but still unlock the benefits of autonomous agents, Archestra’s open-source solution acts as an “MCP orchestrator”; providing the guardrails, data management, and permission tools enterprises need to reap the productivity benefits of AI without exposing themselves to new risks.
The Archestra solution is part of the burgeoning integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) market that is forecast to exceed £12bn in revenue by 2028.
