If you want to start a new business, it helps if your idea chimes with the latest zeitgeist, writes Nick Mulcahy.
All the chatter at the moment is about agentic AI and plenty of smart entrepreneurs are jumping on the bandwagon.
Regular AI requires prompts, while an AI agent takes on multi-step tasks and completes them on your behalf.
The promise to commerce is that the more you deploy AI agents, the less requirement for payroll or agency overheads.
Irish VC Sure Valley Ventures has invested in Ralio, which is building a payments platform for AI agents.
The London startup recently raised $2.5m in pre-seed funding, and SVV’s Barry Downes said: “Ralio is embedding verification and compliance directly into agentic payments. This category-defining infrastructure is exactly the type of opportunity we look for.”
Also in London, Trinity College Dublin graduate Pac O’Shea is co-founder at Round, a finance automation platform that raised $6m in seed funding in April.
Its Agentic Workflow Builder enables finance teams to describe their desired automated workflow in plain English, which the platform then builds for their approval.
“Everyone’s trying to build an AI CFO — something that tells you what to do,” O’Shea explained. “We’re focused on doing the work itself.”
Seasoned entrepreneurs Noel Ruane (51) and Trevor Parsons (45) raised $14m last October in a seed round for Bronto, a log management platform.
According to Parsons, in an agentic world maintaining log data has never been more critical.
“Logging is fundamentally broken, unfit for the volume of data the AI-era has brought, and Bronto fixes that,” he added.
TraqCheck, operating from New Delhi and London, raised $8m last month.
Founder Jaibir Nihal Singh’s objective is to make the hiring process even more impersonal than it already is. “Agents change the interface entirely,” Singh stated.
“You simply tell an AI what role you want to hire for and the system executes the entire workflow. Future hiring teams willrely less on dashboards and more on digital colleagues.”
Also in the agentic ‘digital colleague’ category is Miravoice, a San Francisco startup that recently secured $6m in seed funding for its AI voice interviewer that can deliver up to 120 questions.
“Some of our customers expect to perform millions to tens of millions of calls each year,” co-founder Nishant Jain enthused.
Even without the agentic label,the AI theme is beneficial fortying down state and private investment.
Using AI to cope with European Union red tape helped DevAlly secure €2m pre-seed funding from Enterprise Ireland (EI) and others in October 2025.
Their solution is a response to the European Accessibility Act ,which requires vendors of digital products and services to meet mandatory accessibility standards.
The 2024 startup leverages AI and accessibility LLMs to automate testing and issue tracking.
Aisling Browne and Kingsley Kelly recently raised €2m for their digital advertising startup.
The Glitch pitch is that the AI-powered platform can launch digital campaigns in minutes as it automates the campaign setup, targeting, budget allocation and daily optimisation.
It also promises detailed reports and insights.
Orreco in Galway has a focus on analysing injury risk for athletes.
The company had a negative net worth of €7m at the end of 2023 after trading for over a decade, but landed $4m investment last December, including $1m from EI.
It helped that Orreco acquired AI specialist Data Driven Sports Analytics in Melbourne.
The plan now is to accelerate Orreco’s AI-powered Motion Signal, billed as a breakthrough method of analysing athlete movement behaviour using computer vision and machine learning.
Agentic AI may still be more promise than proof, but the funding rounds suggest investors are not waiting around.
What remains to be seen is whether the technology does the work or just talks about it.