The Physical World Gets a Digital Workforce

The physical economy is entering a new build cycle, and the ambition and scale behind it is breathtaking.

Companies are investing in data centers, factories, energy systems, and supply chains for an AI-driven world. The teams financing, building, and running that infrastructure need software that can do more than surface information. They need systems that can carry work through to completion.

That is what makes Magentic (opens in new tab) so important. Its agentic work platform gives manufacturing, supply chain, and finance teams AI digital workers that diagnose, plan, act, and see the work through, while people stay in command.

From dashboards to digital workers

Dashboards can show a team that something is wrong. Generative AI can read and write. Resolving a complex enterprise problem from beginning to end still takes an enormous amount of human work.

The starting point inside a large company is usually messy. Contracts, purchase orders, invoices, delivery records, emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets sit across systems that use different names for the same supplier or part. In our diligence, we heard from one global company with more than 70 ERP instances. That level of fragmentation is common in large enterprises.

Magentic’s AI digital workers, called Mages, work across that environment. Its data layer learns how an organization connects suppliers, parts, contracts, and transactions, then resolves records across systems. A Mage can diagnose a problem, gather the evidence, plan the next step, and act.

Consider a supplier that misses a delivery date. A Mage can check the service-level agreement, compare it with the ERP record, contact the warehouse to confirm what happened, and assemble the evidence. It can recommend whether to enforce a penalty or notify the supplier of a breach, draft the communication, update the relevant systems, and keep the case moving. A person remains in control when the decision requires judgment.

The same approach applies to price discrepancies, missed rebates, duplicate payments, supplier compliance, and source-to-pay processes. Each recommendation comes with the relevant contract clause, transaction, or supplier communication, so teams can understand the basis for an action before approving it.

“Procurement at our scale involves an enormous amount of detail,” says Anthony Breach, Director of the Procurement Center of Excellence at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners. “Working with Magentic gives our teams better tools for procurement work, and more time for the decisions that need judgement.”

Built for the way enterprises work

Before I went into venture capital, I advised companies on supply chain and sat in rooms where strategic direct-procurement decisions were made. I saw how much depended on data spread across systems and on the experience of the people who knew how to interpret it. I was looking for an approach that did not require category buyers to adopt another portal or reorganize their work before seeing value.

Magentic starts with post-contract performance: making sure that what happens after a contract is signed matches what the company negotiated. The need is constant, the results are measurable, and most teams cannot check every contract against every transaction on their own. From there, the same data and agent systems can support broader work across procurement, supply chain, and finance.

Customer Obsessed Founders

When Magentic announced its seed round, we recognized the product approach (opens in new tab) we had been looking for and reached out to Robin immediately. Before he would take a meeting with us, he asked for introductions to enterprise customers. We loved that – Robin was already focused on getting close to customers and putting the product to work, the same customer obsession we see in the most successful founders.

We made the intros quickly and the feedback from customers was overwhelmingly positive. And this feedback was consistent with their large, existing enterprise customers. For example, Sebastian Kahlmeyer, Senior Vice President of Supply Chain Management Digitalization at Siemens, describes the partnership with Magentic this way: “We are on a continuous journey to identify the partners who push the frontier of value creation with us. Magentic is one such partner helping to go beyond.”

Robin and Odhran are the killer combination that resonates with demanding global enterprises. Robin spent five years at McKinsey leading procurement and supply-chain work for global manufacturers. His co-founder, Odhran O’Donoghue, holds a PhD in machine learning from Oxford and has worked at OpenAI, NASA, and the Francis Crick Institute. The two have been friends for years and won hackathons together in college. Robin brings the domain knowledge to identify the right enterprise problems; Odhran brings the technical depth to build agents that can reason across messy data and act with evidence.

Felicis is proud to lead Magentic’s Series A, alongside existing investors Sequoia Capital and The Westly Group.

Value recovery was the starting point. What excites us is where Magentic can go from here. Its digital workforce can operate across manufacturing, supply chain, and finance, carry long-horizon work from diagnosis to resolution, and give people better information for the decisions that they alone can make.