Sherpa.ai raises €16.4 million to put data sovereignty at the centre of enterprise AI

Sherpa.ai, the Basque AI company led by founder and CEO Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, has raised €16.4 million (approximately $18 million) in new funding. Forgepoint Capital, a Silicon Valley venture firm focused on cybersecurity and enterprise AI, entered as the new lead investor. Existing backers — Mundi Ventures, Ekarpen (the Basque Country VC), Allegra Holdings, and SETT — participated alongside. The company builds a privacy-preserving, federated AI platform: a system that lets regulated organisations run AI without routing their data through third-party cloud infrastructure.

The compliance barrier to enterprise AI

For most enterprise AI deployments today, the implicit requirement is data movement. The organisation's information travels to a model provider's infrastructure for training or inference, and the organisation trusts that provider's assurances about what happens to it. For banks, health systems, and government agencies, that trust is precisely what compliance and procurement frameworks are designed to prevent from being extended without rigorous oversight.

Sherpa.ai's architecture centres on federated learning: a training approach where model updates — not raw data — move between parties. The underlying data stays local to each organisation; only the learning derived from it is shared. The platform extends this to multi-party settings, allowing institutions to benefit from collectively improved models without ever pooling the data that produces them.

The reference client is Caja Laboral, the major Basque cooperative bank — a credibility anchor in the sector where data-governance requirements are most stringent. Sherpa.ai's claim is that it has closed the gap between federated learning as a research concept and federated learning as an enterprise product — a gap that has been the friction point for most of the past decade.

What Forgepoint Capital is backing

The new lead's identity is the structural signal of the round. Forgepoint's portfolio is oriented toward cybersecurity and enterprise AI risk — the category that grows directly as AI adoption scales and regulatory scrutiny of data handling increases. The fund is not backing Sherpa.ai despite the compliance positioning; it is backing it because of it.

Uribe-Etxebarria is explicit: "This round allows us to accelerate our vision: to develop and commercialise a secure and scalable artificial intelligence platform that enables companies and governments to harness the full potential of AI without giving up control, privacy and sovereignty over their data."

The capital goes toward international expansion in healthcare, finance, and government markets outside Spain. The strategic timing matters: the hyperscalers are building their own privacy-preserving AI offerings, but those products are still establishing the institutional audit trails and compliance certifications that regulated procurement requires. Whether Sherpa.ai can build enough of a reference base in the window before those offerings mature — and whether federated architecture remains the technically superior choice once the cloud giants arrive fully — is the question the round is built to begin answering.