2 hours ago
3
Pablo Palafox likes to say his company is “getting started” even as its valuation just crossed ten figures.
HappyRobot, the startup that builds AI agents to run the phone calls, emails, and scheduling that keep supply chains moving, just raised a $150 million Series C at a $1.2 billion valuation, Fortune learned exclusively. Prysm Capital and Eurazeo co-led the round, with participation from Bankinter, Kfund, Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), Orange, and T Capital (Deutsche Telekom).
The round comes less than a year after HappyRobot’s $44 million Series B, which itself followed a $15.6 million Series A led by a16z in December 2024. Revenue has grown more than 5x since that Series B, and net dollar retention has topped 150%, Palafox told me. One large U.S. supply chain customer, he said, expanded its contract 10x in a single year and others grew their commitments by up to 5X.
HappyRobot’s pitch is simple: instead of chatbots that draft suggestions for humans, its AI agents actually do the work, negotiating with truck drivers, scheduling appointments, and handling customer support end to end. The company started in logistics—where it now counts DHL, Uber, Kuehne + Nagel, Naturgy, and Repsol among its 150-plus enterprise customers—and is pushing into telecom, energy, utilities, airlines, and financial services. It’s chasing a fast-growing pool of money: the broader enterprise AI agents category is expected to balloon toward $295 billion by 2035.
Palafox, who did his PhD in computer vision and worked on autonomous systems at Meta’s Reality Labs before founding HappyRobot, said his research background mattered less than expected. “The truth is a lot more messy,” he explained, describing how the real unlock came from sitting next to customers’ own operators to see how the work actually got done.
He met cofounder Luis Paarup on their second day of college in Spain in 2012. The two, along with Palafox’s brother Javi, still split responsibilities almost exactly as they did at founding: Paarup runs product and engineering, Javi handles operations and the early sales motion, and Pablo does deployments and customer-facing work, a role he says suits him after years of theater and piano growing up.
a16z general partner Anish Acharya, who has sat on HappyRobot’s board since the Series A, said the company built its way into a horizontal platform by first solving a brutally hard problem: getting AI to negotiate freight prices without hallucinating. “If the model once in a while hallucinates the price of a million dollars, that could be a big problem,” he said.
New investor Kerry Wei of Prysm Capital, who led the growth-equity firm’s check, said what convinced her was unanimous customer feedback and a founding team she considers refreshingly unpretentious. “They’re not trying to be a cool AI startup,” she told me.
See you tomorrow,
Lily Mae Lazarus
X: @LilyMaeLazarus
Email: [email protected]
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.
Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
