Ascentra Labs raises £1.5m in seed funding from NAP to build an autonomous consulting workforce

Ascentra Labs, the company building AI tools for consultants and corporate strategy professionals, has raised £1.5 million in seed funding led by NAP, with participation from prominent founder-angels including Alan Chang and Fredrik Hjelm.

Despite being one of the world’s largest services markets, valued at $250Bn+ in 2025, consulting has remained largely untouched by recent waves of AI. While law and accounting have seen many VC-backed start-ups, consulting remains nascent.

The Ascentra team is changing this by taking specific consulting tasks and building products to accelerate the process. Their focus is the private equity consulting space, where the analyses are most repeatable project to project.

Founded in London at the start of 2025, Ascentra Labs is led by Paritosh Devbhandari, a former McKinsey consultant who previously led AI product sales at QuantumBlack, and Oliver Thurston, former Head of ML at Mathison AI.

In just a few months since launch, Ascentra Labs has gained early traction with tier 1 consulting firms and private equity firms. More than 80% of customers are US-based, and the company already counts three of the world’s top five consulting firms among its users. Early adopters report 2-4x faster execution of key project workflows, transforming how teams deliver work.

Ascentra Labs will use the funding to expand its product suite and support its expansion in the US.