There is a pointed line in Riplo's pitch: the $1 trillion consulting industry is currently running on the digital equivalent of a typewriter.
The London-based startup raised £2.3 million in pre-seed funding to fix that. The round was led by Cherry Ventures, with participation from Blue Lion Capital, the founders of QuantumBlack - McKinsey's AI analytics division - and angels from technology and professional services. The capital will go toward expanding the engineering team, deepening collaboration with design partners, and continuing platform development.
What Riplo Is Building
Consulting workflows are knowledge-intensive, high-stakes, and almost entirely built around tools designed for humans working alone. Slide decks, spreadsheets, document templates, shared drives - the infrastructure of consulting work was designed for a world without AI agents. Most attempts to add AI to this environment layer chatbots on top of existing tools rather than rethinking the interface from the ground up.
Riplo's approach starts differently. The platform is built around an agent-first interface where AI agents work alongside human consultants in real time, within the same environment. Analysts structure analyses, draft deliverables, and iterate on workstreams with AI operating as a genuine collaborator rather than a search-and-summarize add-on. The interface is designed for the collaboration to happen in a single unified workspace - not shuttling between a chat window and a document.
The Team and the Backers
CEO Tobias Haefele co-founded Riplo with Oliver Scott and Zack Zornitta, bringing combined experience across AI product development, consulting, and engineering. The backing from QuantumBlack's founders is strategically meaningful - QuantumBlack sits at the intersection of advanced AI and management consulting and has operated at the scale Riplo is building toward. They understand the workflow problems from inside the industry rather than from outside it.
Cherry Ventures, based in Berlin, focuses specifically on pre-seed and seed stage European startups and brings the network and operational support that early-stage technical companies typically need more than capital.
Why Consulting, Why Now
From four years advising executives on AI implementation, consulting stands out as one of the industries most structurally resistant to AI adoption despite being most theoretically suited to it. The work is fundamentally cognitive, the outputs are documents and analyses, and the bottleneck is often cycle time - the hours between receiving data and delivering a finished recommendation. AI agents that can help structure a framework, draft a first version of a slide narrative, or run a sensitivity analysis in parallel with human review could compress that cycle dramatically.
The constraint has been the interface. Consultants need to maintain quality and judgment over outputs. Tools that are not designed for human oversight at the workflow level get abandoned. Riplo's bet is that building the interface first - rather than the AI capability first - is the right sequence. Y Combinator ranked AI-native agencies third on its Spring 2026 wish list. The infrastructure layer for professional services AI may be the category that matters just as much.
