Sherpa.ai has raised $18 million in a new funding round to accelerate the development of its artificial intelligence platform for enterprises and governments, with a focus on privacy, security and data sovereignty.
The round includes Forgepoint Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm focused on cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, as a new investor. Existing investors Mundi Ventures, Ekarpen, Allegra Holdings and SETT also participated.
The investment will support Sherpa.ai’s continued work on AI infrastructure that enables organisations to train, deploy and operate models collaboratively without sharing sensitive information. This approach is particularly relevant for regulated sectors such as healthcare, finance, industry, cybersecurity and the public sector, where data privacy and security requirements can limit traditional AI deployment.
“This round allows us to accelerate our vision: to develop and commercialise a secure and scalable artificial intelligence platform that enables companies and governments to harness the full potential of AI without giving up control, privacy and sovereignty over their data,” said Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, founder and CEO of Sherpa.ai.
The funding follows a period of strong commercial growth for the company. In recent months, Sherpa.ai has signed contracts with organisations including Indra, the US National Institutes of Health, Centogene Genomics, Caja Laboral, Unicaja and Prosegur. These projects span sectors where the ability to adopt AI securely and responsibly is becoming increasingly important.
In parallel, Sherpa.ai continues to invest in research and scientific validation. The company has published peer-reviewed studies on privacy-preserving AI, federated learning and distributed training, including research on training large language models with private distributed data, federated learning for rare disease diagnosis, Blind Federated Learning and techniques that reduce communication requirements by up to 99%.
With this new funding, Sherpa.ai plans to expand the capabilities of its platform throughout the year, adding new features for enterprise and public sector users.
As organisations and governments increasingly prioritise sovereign AI, Sherpa.ai is focused on enabling a new model of artificial intelligence: one where companies and institutions can collaborate, build better models and unlock value from distributed data without compromising privacy, security or control.