A startup that slashes AI agent bills just raised $35M. Anthropic is a backer.
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Sapiom, a San Francisco startup that routes AI agent calls to the cheapest capable model, has raised a $35M Series A led by Dragonfly, bringing total funding to $50M. The company sits between AI agents and the models they run on, enforcing budgets before spend occurs. A key case study shows customer Polsia cutting its Anthropic bill from $1.2M to ~$100K per month after using Sapiom. Notably, Anthropic itself is a backer alongside Okta Ventures and Menlo Ventures. The startup competes in a crowded model-routing space against OpenRouter, Amazon Bedrock, and Azure, but differentiates by owning its own inference infrastructure in a San Jose data center. Gartner forecasts over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027 due to escalating costs, which Sapiom is betting will drive demand for its cost-control platform.
