External workers – contractors, freelancers, consultants, service providers – now make up 30–50% of enterprise labour, representing more than $6.8 trillion in annual global spend.
Yet despite being one of the largest cost categories in business, they still run on clunky vendor management systems that are slow to deploy and expensive to maintain. Anyone who has worked in a large enterprise has experienced the often weeks-long pain of onboarding external freelancers and suppliers, ultimately resulting in delayed timelines and soured relationships.
Sherpa, a Munich-based startup, has raised $2.2 million to rebuild these systems from scratch. We’re proud to lead their round alongside DN Capital, Activant Capital, and Brighteye, and a group of operator angels.
Sherpa is the AI operating system for the external workforce: a single platform that brings together the entire lifecycle of work, from request to payment. Where legacy systems fragment the contracting process across multiple tools and intermediaries, Sherpa consolidates everything in one place, giving teams full visibility over who is doing what, at what cost, and to what standard.
The platform is also built for a shift that’s already well underway: AI agents entering the workforce.
As enterprise customers deploy agents into their operations, they’ve discovered that they have requirements similar to any human workers: onboarding, compliance, performance management, and day-to-day oversight.
Sherpa manages both human and AI-driven work through one unified operating model, with data kept private, sovereign, and fully under the organisation’s control. With enterprise customers increasingly sensitive to sky-rocketing token costs, this level of oversight is sorely needed.
“The future workforce won’t just be human,” said Tristan Deschler, Founder and CEO of Sherpa.
“It will be a dynamic mix of employees, contractors, service providers, and AI agents working together. The challenge is that the systems enterprises rely on today were never designed to manage that complexity. There is a huge demand for a single platform where all work can be requested, governed, delivered, and measured, regardless of whether it’s performed by a person or an AI agent. We believe workforce management is evolving into work orchestration, and Sherpa is building the infrastructure to power that transition.”
Founded by Tristan Deschler (CEO), Tim Altpeter (COO), and Max Lang (CTO), the team brings firsthand experience managing external workforces at scale. Deschler was among the first ten hires at procurement technology company Fairmarkit, helping scale the company from $1 million to tens of millions in revenue over six years.
Will Bennett, Principal at Seedcamp, welcomed the raise: “Tristan Deschler, Tim Altpeter and Maximilian Lang have a rare combo of deep external workforce experience and serious enterprise AI hustle.”
“When Tristan told us he had been doing almost 100 flights per year with Fairmarkit, we knew we had to get into business together.
“When Tristan told us he had been doing almost 100 flights per year with Fairmarkit, we knew we had to get into business together."Will Bennett ~ Seedcamp
Sherpa is currently working with Fortune 500 enterprises across the EU, UK, and US through early design partnerships and pilot programs, with activity spanning pharmaceuticals, industrials, SaaS, and marketplaces.
The funding will be used to expand enterprise deployments, deepen integrations across VMS, orchestration platforms, HRIS, ERP, and ATS systems, and support compliance readiness, including SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification.