The Basque company Sherpa.ai, specialized in AI and data privacy, closed at the beginning of July an $18 million financing round. This has some relevance, since the State itself participated in the round through the American fund Forgepoint Capital, being the first time that the Government has become a shareholder in the company.
What has happened? Sherpa.ai, founded in Erandio (Vizcaya) by Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, has closed its first round of financing since 2021, the year in which had raised 8.5 million dollars. In this new injection of capital, the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation (SETT), the public vehicle linked to the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Service, enters as an investor. Known as the “digital SEPI”, it is the way that the Government has to invest in technology companies.
Who is behind. The fund leading the operation is Forgepoint Capital, a Silicon Valley firm specialized in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence that, as share From El Mundo, he had already invested in two other Basque companies in the sector, Maisa AI and Multiverse Computing. Along with Forgepoint, there are repeat investors who were already in the capital of Sherpa.ai: the Mundi Ventures fund, from investor Javier Santiso; Ekarpen, the Basque Government’s venture capital vehicle; and Allegra Holdings, one of the investment companies of the Losantos Ucha family, precisely the owner of the largest fortune in La Rioja.
In detail. Sherpa.ai has been operating for more than a decade and it is one of the Spanish companies with the most experience in artificial intelligence. They focus mainly on what they call “data sovereignty”, that is, the possibility of training and using large language models without the information leaving the client’s servers. It is an approach that is increasingly in demand in this sector, since no company likes having their data flying around while they use AI.
Among its clients are Indra, which in fact was close to buying the company two years ago, the United States National Institute of Health (NIH), Caja Laboral, Unicaja and Prosegur, according to they count from the middle.
Why does it matter? The entry of SETT into Sherpa.ai is part of the distribution of European funds that the Government has been allocating to technology companies considered key to strengthening Spain’s digital sovereignty. According to collect El Mundo, this operation is one of the last in which the digital SEPI has participated with this item of European funds, since the deadline to commit the capital expired on June 30.
In recent weeks, this same route of public financing has also reached another Basque company, Multiverse Computing, which received more than 100 million euros, as well as Openchip.
The founder and CEO of Sherpa.ai, Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, explained that “this round allows us to accelerate our vision: to develop and commercialize a secure and scalable artificial intelligence platform that allows companies and governments to harness the full potential of AI without giving up control, privacy and sovereignty of their data.”
Investigation. The company assures having also reinforced its scientific activity in parallel. And at the beginning of July he presented a study on how to train large language models with private data distributed among different organizations, without the need to share them, which reinforces this commercial discourse of technological sovereignty with the intention of favoring sectors such as health, banking or public administration.
Basque Country, on fire. With the new funds, Sherpa.ai plans to accelerate the development of its platform and expand its international presence, especially in sectors such as healthcare, finance, cybersecurity and government. Furthermore, the Basque technology ecosystem is gaining traction, as several AI companies in the region have received capital injections these last weeks from the digital SEPI (the aforementioned Maisa AI and Multiverse Computing), just before the deadline to commit European funds.
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