Amsterdam's Orq.ai Raises €5 Million to Fix Enterprise AI's Production Deployment Problem

Amsterdam-based Orq.ai has secured €5 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round to help enterprises bridge the critical gap between impressive AI prototypes and reliable production systems. The investment, led by seed + speed Ventures and Galion.exe, brings the company's total funding to €7.3 million as it addresses what founders call enterprise AI's most persistent challenge.

"Most companies can build a great demo. The real challenge is getting that demo into production without losing control over quality, compliance, or costs. Orq.ai exists to close that gap," said co-founder Sohrab Hosseini. The platform provides a unified control layer for the entire AI agent lifecycle, enabling organizations to experiment, evaluate, deploy, monitor, and optimize AI agents through a single interface that prioritizes safety and scalability.

While most large enterprises have figured out how to build flashy AI demonstrations, production deployment remains elusive. AI systems that work well in controlled environments often collapse when encountering real-world data volumes, regulatory obligations, and operational complexity. Performance degrades, control becomes difficult, and compliance concerns emerge as barriers preventing scaled deployment.

This pattern has created what investors describe as "prototype purgatory"—organizations with dozens of successful AI proofs-of-concept that never graduate to operational systems. The gap is hampered by compliance, cost, and governance issues that traditional development tools don't adequately address.

Orq.ai directly tackles these obstacles by integrating AI experimentation, evaluation, observability, governance, and runtime into a single platform. Unlike open-source frameworks like AutoGen and CrewAI that focus on agent development, Orq.ai provides the enterprise control layer necessary for secure, compliant operations across teams and environments.

The newly launched Agent Studio allows businesses to configure complex agent behaviors, workflows, and decision rules while the underlying platform manages the execution layer. The platform reduces agent development time by 67% and frees up significant engineering capacity, according to company claims based on customer deployments.

Orq.ai's Platform 4.0 supports over 300 large language models and offers flexible deployment across cloud, hybrid, and fully on-premises environments. This infrastructure-agnostic design proves particularly valuable for European companies navigating the EU AI Act and GDPR data sovereignty requirements, as organizations can run AI systems securely within their own infrastructure.

The platform combines an AI gateway with built-in evaluation, monitoring, and collaboration tools that enterprises need but typically piece together from multiple vendors. This integrated approach gives companies clarity on how agents behave, how data moves through systems, and how to maintain compliance as regulations evolve.

Organizations including Dutch software companies Afas and MoneyBird, along with enterprises like Keyrus and Helloprint, have deployed Orq.ai to transition from isolated AI experiments to large-scale operational deployments.

The funding round attracted participation from Curiosity VC, Spacetime, XO Ventures, xdeck ventures, Waves Capital, and GoldenEggCheck alongside lead investors. Strategic advisors joining the company include Sam Bourton (co-founder of QuantumBlack/McKinsey), Adriaan Mol (founder of Mollie), and Daniel Gebler (CTO of Picnic), who will support expansion into advanced enterprise and data governance capabilities.

"AI agents are becoming much like cloud infrastructure in the last technology cycle," noted Alexander Kölpin, Managing Director at seed + speed Ventures. Companies will need a reliable way to orchestrate and govern them, positioning Orq.ai to capture market share as enterprises shift from experimentation to production-grade AI deployment.

The investment timing reflects broader enterprise AI maturity. "Leading enterprises have moved past AI experimentation. Their focus now is production," said Herman Kienhuis from Curiosity VC. This shift from prototype to production represents the current frontier in enterprise AI adoption, where technical capability no longer determines success—operational reliability and governance do.

Orq.ai will use the fresh capital to expand its 25-person team across engineering, enterprise sales, and customer success functions. The company plans to deepen its presence in key European markets while accelerating North American growth, where similar production deployment challenges exist but regulatory frameworks differ.

The funding coincides with a complete rebrand and redesigned platform experience reflecting the company's evolution since its 2022 founding by Hosseini and Anthony Diaz. Over 100 organizations now rely on Orq.ai as they operationalize AI at scale, providing validation of the company's approach and product-market fit.

For enterprises, the platform addresses a critical operational question: how to industrialize AI agent creation, improvement, and deployment without sacrificing control, compliance, or performance. As Kevin Kuipers of Galion.exe noted, Orq.ai "accelerates our development process daily and is even used by non-technical profiles," suggesting the platform successfully bridges technical and business requirements.

The competitive landscape for enterprise AI tooling remains fragmented, with specialized point solutions handling different aspects of the AI lifecycle. Orq.ai's integrated approach—combining development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and governance—positions it as infrastructure layer rather than feature, potentially commanding stronger market position as AI agents become foundational to enterprise software.

As regulatory requirements intensify globally and enterprises demand production-grade AI systems, platforms providing the governance and control layer will likely see sustained demand. Orq.ai's seed funding and customer traction suggest the market recognizes this infrastructure gap and values solutions addressing it comprehensively.