Sherpa, an early-stage enterprise software company, has raised $2.2 million in pre-seed funding to build what it describes as an AI operating system for external work—the contingent talent, suppliers, services and AI agents that now account for the majority of how large enterprises get things done. The round is backed by Seedcamp, DN Capital, Activant and Brighteye, alongside operator angels who have previously scaled enterprise companies.
The company’s thesis is that external work has quietly become the dominant mode of enterprise execution—a $6.8 trillion market—yet the software designed to manage it has never caught up. The current stack typically consists of legacy vendor management systems, spreadsheets and outsourced managed service providers, each operating in silos and unable to provide unified orchestration, governance or visibility across the full external workforce. As AI agents begin to enter enterprise workflows alongside human contractors and suppliers, sherpa argues that this gap does not merely persist—it multiplies, because organizations now need to orchestrate across human and AI workers simultaneously with no unified platform to do so.
Sherpa’s platform is designed to address that problem end-to-end. Every engagement begins as intent—something that needs doing and sherpa orchestrates it from that point: routing work down the right path whether it belongs to an internal team, an external contractor or an AI agent, then scoping the engagement, governing it and processing payment, all within a single platform and a single source of truth. The company is starting with the external workforce segment, a $14 billion-plus software market that it sees as the sharpest point of pain, before expanding orchestration across the full spectrum of how enterprises get work done.
The pre-seed capital will be used to build the core team around sherpa’s vision and bring its first enterprise deployments to life. Investors are backing a conviction that orchestration, connecting intent to execution across internal, external, and AI workers, represents the next structural layer of enterprise software, analogous to how ERP unified internal operations or how CRM unified customer relationships.
