New York-based start-up Evos has raised $9 million of pre-seed funding, the business will announce today, after the company’s annualized recurring revenues (ARR) reached $1 million within four weeks of its launch. The business, which builds agentic artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for small and mid-sized industrial businesses, claims its technology meets the needs of sectors often overlooked by developers.

“This segment of the market has been neglected, particularly in areas such as logistics, manufacturing, energy and other industrials,” says Urav Shah, the founder and CEO. “They’re stuck with legacy systems that require staff to spend much of their time on tasks such as data entry, rather than using software that carries them forward.”

Evos – the name stands for Evolutionary Operating Systems – believes it can step into this gap. It develops “autonomous operators”, AI agents that can take on many of the processes and workflows currently handled manually by these businesses. These tasks range from managing invoices to overseeing dispatch, with Evos offering agents that cover around 400 individual roles and responsibilities.

In the start-up’s target market – typically firms with between 20 and 200 employers – businesses don’t have sufficient resources to install large enterprise resource planning systems, with the cost of adoption and implementation of these solutions often running into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Instead, Shah says, they typically pay costly fees to consultants who spend months helping them to map and automate workflows.

Evos’s pitch is that it can do the work of those consultants far more quickly and cheaply, by installing autonomous operators that learn on the job. These agents operate alongside human workers, observing how they carry out manual tasks so they can take over the work; once the agent masters the task, it can do the work by itself.

It’s an approach that reflects the reality of businesses of this size, where processes are rarely standardized and where know-how is locked inside the minds of its most experienced people, rather than codified. “The most capable system in many of these businesses is the person who has been there 20 years, and what they know has never been written down,” adds Shah. “An Evos operator learns the job from these people, improves on it, and proves it can match them before it takes on any work by itself.”

Since its launch earlier this year, Evos has signed up around 20 customers and believes its rapid growth will see it hit $10 million of ARR within six months. That’s despite some tough competition from much larger software providers targeting this market, including Palantir and Dystyl, as well as firms such as Edra and BackOps which have raised more than $100 million of funding between them. Logistics-specific rivals also include Augment, HappyRobot and Envoy AI.

However, Shah argues Evos can secure competitive advantage by focusing on deployment and delivery. Many of its rivals deliver point solutions that have to be implemented one-by-one and aren’t tailored to the business, prompting lengthy deployment times. “An Evos operator is live within 24 hours,” Shah points out.

Funding will also help the company fight its corner. Today’s pre-seed round is co-led by Uncork Capital and Field Ventures, with participation from Crosslink Capital, Utopia Capital Management, Sandwith Ventures and a number of business angels. “The funding will help us scale the team, particularly as we unveil a new version of the platform before the end of the year,” says Shah. “We’re also expanding our partnerships team, which works very closely with our customers.”

The company’s investors believe in its potential. “For decades, software sold to industrial businesses has helped people organize and track work, but it has stopped short of doing the work,” says Richard Kerby, partner at Field Ventures. “Evos changes that: its autonomous operators learn the judgment behind how a business runs, work within existing systems, and take ownership of entire operational functions.”

Tripp Jones, general partner at Uncork Capital, adds: “Most software helps industrial businesses keep track of their work, but for the first time, Evos is helping them get it done.”