Most large companies have figured out how to build a flashy AI demo. The real challenge is getting that demo into production without the whole system collapsing under the weight of compliance, cost, and governance issues.
That gap is precisely what Amsterdam-based Orq.ai aims to close. The company, which provides a unified control platform for deploying and managing AI agents, announced today it has secured €5 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round. The latest Orq.ai funding brings its total capital raised to €7.3 million.
The round was led by seed + speed Ventures and Galion.exe, with continued participation from existing backers including Curiosity VC and Spacetime. The investment arrives as enterprises globally shift focus from isolated AI experiments to operational systems running at scale, a transition often hampered by fragmented tools and a lack of reliable governance.
Orq.ai’s platform is designed to handle the entire execution layer for AI agents. Its new Agent Studio allows businesses to configure complex behaviors and decision rules, while the underlying platform manages evaluation, observability, and security. This unified approach is already being used by organizations like Afas and Moneybird to move their AI initiatives out of prototype purgatory.
The Control Layer for AI Agents
The market for AI agents is rapidly evolving from niche tools into foundational enterprise infrastructure. Alexander Kölpin, Managing Director at seed + speed Ventures, noted that AI agents are becoming "much like cloud infrastructure in the last technology cycle," requiring a reliable way to orchestrate and govern them.
For European companies, the need for robust governance is amplified by the EU AI Act and GDPR. Orq.ai directly addresses this by offering an infrastructure-agnostic design that supports cloud, hybrid, and fully on-prem deployments. This flexibility is critical for meeting data sovereignty and residency requirements that often stall large-scale AI adoption.
“Most companies can build a great demo. The real challenge is getting that demo into production without losing control over quality, compliance, or costs,” said Sohrab Hosseini, Co-founder of Orq.ai.
The platform is essentially an enterprise control layer, combining an AI gateway (supporting over 300 models) with built-in evaluation, monitoring, and collaboration tools. Orq.ai claims this integration reduces agent development time by 67% and frees up significant engineering capacity.
With the new capital, Orq.ai plans to expand its 25-person team across engineering and sales, accelerating its growth in key European markets while deepening its push into North America. The Orq.ai funding also introduces strategic advisors, including Adriaan Mol (Mollie founder) and Daniel Gebler (Picnic CTO), to bolster its expansion into advanced enterprise and data governance capabilities.
