Evos raises $9m pre-seed to deploy AI operators for industrial SMEs

Evos, a New York startup developing what it calls autonomous operators for the physical economy, has emerged from stealth with $9 million in pre-seed funding. The round was co-led by Uncork Capital and Field Ventures, with Crosslink Capital, Utopia Capital Management, Sandwith Ventures and several angel investors also participating. The company says it will use the capital to grow its team and expand its platform to small and mid-sized businesses in manufacturing, logistics and freight.

Founded in 2026 by Urav Shah, Evos positions itself as an agentic operations layer for industries that have historically been underserved by enterprise software. Its operators are designed to learn from the observed behaviour and decision-making patterns of a company's experienced staff, rather than from written documentation or text prompts. The platform then works within a business's existing systems, taking autonomous ownership of defined operational functions once its decisions consistently match those of the human benchmark.

The product and early traction

The company describes its deployment methodology as the "Trifecta": one hour spent with domain experts, a working operator available the following day, and measurable outcomes within a month. Evos says work that would typically require nine to eighteen months with a consultant can be live within twenty-four hours of discovery.

One named customer, freight brokerage MyFreightWorld, is already running an Evos operator to audit carrier invoices against its transport management system. According to the release, the operator processed nearly 3,500 audit decisions at 97% accuracy in its first two months, clearing more than $600,000 of invoice value in the most recent five-week period. Mike Chalfant, president of MyFreightWorld, said the deployment had improved billing accuracy and efficiency with no upfront investment, and that the company intended to extend the platform to additional functions.

The distinction Evos draws from conventional AI tooling is relevant here: rather than responding to prompts on demand, an Evos operator is assigned a function and manages it end-to-end, reporting on outcomes rather than waiting for human-initiated queries.

Market context and competitive landscape

The agentic AI market is attracting significant investment, with a growing number of vendors targeting autonomous workflow execution across finance, legal, customer support and supply chain. Enterprise-focused players such as UiPath and ServiceNow have been incorporating agentic capabilities into their existing automation stacks, while a cohort of well-funded startups including Ema, Cogna and various vertical-specific operators are pursuing similar territory from the ground up.

Evos's stated focus on small and mid-sized industrial businesses is a meaningful differentiation choice, even if it creates its own commercial challenges. The SME segment in physical industries typically has constrained IT budgets, limited integration expertise and high scepticism of technology vendors; a self-serve, rapid-deployment model directly addresses those barriers. The company's emphasis on knowledge capture from retiring workers also speaks to a genuine structural problem in manufacturing and freight: an ageing skilled workforce whose tacit knowledge is difficult to document and transfer.

Richard Kerby, partner at Field Ventures, said Evos had moved from concept to measurable customer value at an exceptional speed, and that he believed the platform could become the operating layer for the physical economy. Uncork Capital general partner Tripp Jones highlighted that teams were deploying Evos operators on core business functions without lengthy technology rollouts, putting the capability within reach of businesses that software had historically overlooked.

Evos plans to formally launch its platform under the name Workhorse in the coming weeks. At that point, investors and prospective customers will be looking for broader customer disclosures, additional accuracy and throughput benchmarks across industry verticals, and clarity on pricing for the SME segment the company is targeting.