Sherpa raises €2M Pre-Seed to manage external workers and AI agents through one platform

Sherpa, a Munich-based startup building an enterprise platform for managing external workers and AI agents, has raised €2 million ($2.2 million) in a Pre-Seed round co-led by Seedcamp, DN Capital, Activant Capital, and Brighteye, with additional participation from operator angels. The company was co-founded by Tristan Deschler, Tim Altpeter, and Max Lang.

Note: Sherpa is distinct from ProYarn's earlier coverage of Sherpa.ai (Basque Country, Spain), an enterprise AI platform for data sovereignty. The two companies share a name and nothing else.

The workforce management gap

Enterprises have built up external workforce management infrastructure over two decades: vendor management systems, procurement workflows, contract templates, payment processes. That infrastructure was designed around a specific model of external work — a human contractor or consultant, assigned to a project, deliverable tracked against a statement of work, invoice submitted, payment processed.

AI agents do not fit that model. An enterprise deploying an AI agent to handle a defined set of tasks — processing invoices, drafting contracts, responding to tier-1 support queries — has no existing system that can govern the agent's activity, measure its output against an SLA, or process its "payment" (which is actually a software cost, not a contractor fee). The agent sits outside every existing external workforce process.

Sherpa's platform is designed to be the single point through which all external work — human and AI — is requested, assigned, tracked, delivered, measured, and paid. The pitch is that as AI agents move from pilots into production, enterprises will need unified governance rather than a proliferating stack of point solutions.

A four-way lead

The co-lead structure — four funds sharing the lead at a €2M Pre-Seed — is unusual. It reflects either competitive interest from multiple funds that couldn't be resolved to a single lead, or a deliberate decision to build a broad early consortium for a company that will need both European and US market access. Seedcamp and DN Capital bring European enterprise SaaS networks; Activant Capital brings US enterprise distribution experience; Brighteye focuses on workforce and enterprise productivity.

"There is a huge demand for a single platform where all work can be requested, governed, delivered, and measured, regardless of whether it's performed by a person or an AI agent," Deschler said. "We believe workforce management is evolving into work orchestration, and Sherpa is leading the infrastructure to power that transition."

The timing bet

The round is small and the market thesis is early-stage: most enterprises are still in AI agent pilot mode, not production deployment at a scale where dedicated lifecycle management becomes a bottleneck. Sherpa is betting that the transition from pilot to production will be fast enough that the infrastructure problem becomes acute within its runway.

The 18-month question is whether Sherpa lands enough production-stage enterprise accounts to produce the usage data — and the unit economics — that would support a meaningful Series A. Without that, the platform is a promising product for a problem that has not yet arrived at scale.