Sherpa, AI Platform For External Workforce Management, Raises $2.2m Pre-seed
Sherpa, a new AI operating system for external workforce management, announced a $2.2 million pre-seed funding round co-led by Seedcamp, DN Capital, Activant Capital, and Brighteye, alongside multiple operator angels.
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The company is building the operating system for the external workforce, a category that already represents 30–50% of enterprise labour and more than $6.8 trillion in annual global spending. Yet contractors, freelancers, consultants, and service providers are still managed through legacy Vendor Management Systems (VMS) and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) that are expensive to maintain, slow to deploy, and fundamentally built for a pre-AI era.
Sherpa brings together the entire lifecycle of work, from request to payment, into a single platform. While most organizations still rely on fragmented legacy systems, Sherpa was built from day one for a world where humans and AI agents work side by side.
As enterprises integrate AI agents into their operations, they face many of the same challenges associated with external workforce management, including onboarding, compliance, performance management, and oversight. Sherpa provides the secure infrastructure to manage both human and AI-driven work through a unified operating model, keeping data private, sovereign, and fully under the organization’s control. This enables enterprises and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to move beyond administrative processes toward intelligent workforce orchestration.
Founded in Germany by Tristan Deschler (Founder & CEO), Tim Altpeter (Founder & COO), and Max Lang (Founder & CTO), the team has firsthand experience managing external workforces at scale. Deschler, among Fairmarkit’s first 10 hires, helped scale the procurement technology company from $1 million to tens of millions in revenue over six years.
Sherpa is currently working with Fortune 500 enterprises across the EU, UK, and US through early design partnerships and pilot programs, with activity spanning pharmaceuticals, industrials, SaaS, and marketplaces.
Tristan Deschler, Founder and CEO of Sherpa, said:
“The future workforce won’t just be human. It will be a dynamic mix of employees, contractors, service providers, and AI agents working together. The challenge is that the systems enterprises rely on today were never designed to manage that complexity. 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. We believe workforce management is evolving into work orchestration, and Sherpa is leading the infrastructure to power that transition.”
The funding will be used to expand enterprise deployments, deepen integrations across VMS, orchestration platforms, HRIS, ERP, and ATS systems, and support compliance readiness, including SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification.
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