1. The Market Is Exploding, and Fast

● The global Agentic AI market is forecasted to surge from $28 billion in 2024 to $127 billion by 2029, a compound annual growth rate of ~35 percent CRN.

● Usage is already widespread: 72 percent of medium and large enterprises now deploy agentic AI, with another 21 percent planning adoption in the next two years DevCom.

● High-growth tech startups rely on these agents heavily,22 percent of their market research tasks are now handled by Agentic AI, reducing weeks-long workloads to under 48 hours DigitalDefynd.

2. Venture Capital Is Betting Big

● The startup Cohere reached a $6.8 billion valuation in its latest funding round, positioning agentic AI as central to enterprise-scale productivity tools Reuters.

● IVIX, specializing in AI-driven financial fraud detection, just raised $60 million, signaling investor confidence in government and regulatory use cases The Wall Street Journal.

● Q1 2025 witnessed a boom in venture deals and M&A activity involving agentic AI startups Axios.

3. Real-World Deployments: From Security to Support

● In gaming, 87 percent of developers now integrate AI agents into their workflows for content creation and task automation, most believe it will reduce long-term costs Reuters.

● In cybersecurity, 30 percent of organizations already use Agentic AI in SOCs; another 42 percent are evaluating its deployment for early threat triage and forensic investigation The Wall Street Journal.

● SuperOps launched an Agentic AI marketplace for IT workflows, early adopters report up to 40 percent reduction in manual tasks The Times of India.

● Retail and fashion players like LVMH are pioneering “invisible intelligence” (backend optimization) and “visible intelligence” (personal stylists and trend forecasting) through Agentic systems.

4. Enterprise Tech Infrastructure Builds Momentum

● AWS and Oracle, through partnerships with Google Cloud’s Gemini models, are empowering businesses to rapidly build autonomous agents via tools like AgentCore, offering identity, memory, secure execution, and observability for AI agents DEV Community.

● Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) is emerging as a unifying standard that enables seamless integration of AI agents with different systems,file repositories, messaging platforms, codebases, and tools,enhancing development speed and interoperability.

5. Startup-Led Disruption: Stories You Should Know

● Gradient Labs (UK) has raised a Series A of €11 million+ for Otto, an autonomous agent handling regulated customer service tasks like fraud investigation and complaint management, within just four months, they reached $1 million ARR.

● In India, Ola's Krutrim launched Kruti, a multi-lingual agentic assistant (supporting 13+ Indian languages) capable of automating booking, payments, and document workflows, reportedly delivering >90 percent accuracy in task completion.

6. Early Research Signals: From Science to Governance

● MIT Sloan researchers are studying how agentic agents negotiate and optimize human-AI teams via “personality pairing”,a promising route for smoother collaboration MIT Sloan.

● In industrial settings, newly developed frameworks apply agentic AI to intent-based automation, translating high-level human goals into orchestrated sub-tasks,for example, using natural-language inputs to drive predictive maintenance pipelines with significant efficiency gains.

● In science, agentic systems are aiding hypothesis generation, literature analysis, and experiment planning across chemistry, biology, and materials research.

Key Opportunities for Startups

• Niche Vertical Agentic Tools: Finance (fraud, compliance), healthcare (admin workflows), retail (inventory and pricing), cybersec triage. Early adopters already seeing 30–40% efficiency gains.

• Infrastructure & Tooling: Build agent platforms,SDKs, orchestration, identity, observability (like AWS AgentCore), or integration protocols (MCP). Enterprises need composable, secure systems.

• Horizontal Enterprise AI Agents: Create assistants for document summarization, knowledge workflows, and cross-tool automation (e.g., Cohere’s North tool).

• Regional & Non-English Markets: Echoing Kruti's India-first model, there’s space to build localized multi-agent systems for languages and contexts underserved by global AI giants.

• Governance, Compliance, and Explainability: As use spreads, companies will favor agentic AI systems that are transparent, auditable, and compliant,especially in regulated sectors.

Wisdom from Industry Leaders

“It’s not too late to build AI startups... apply LLMs to real-world sectors… avoid simplistic AI wrappers.”

Greg Brockman, OpenAI

At SwiftSeed, we believe startups that combine domain expertise, agentic workflows, and human-centered design will thrive.