The insight
Sherpa began with two people reaching the same conclusion from opposite ends of the same problem. Tim spent a decade inside the external workforce industry, managing hundreds of millions in contingent spend for one of Europe's largest enterprises and operating programmes across major MSPs. Tristan spent six years on the software side, selling into and building for enterprise procurement teams.
One had lived the operational pain, the other had watched enterprises try and fail to solve it with existing tools. Independently, they arrived at the same insight: one of the largest categories of enterprise spend in Europe still runs on manual coordination, and almost nobody is building for it. When two operators with that depth of experience converge on the same overlooked problem from different roles, it is usually worth paying attention.
Seeing the problem is one thing; being able to rebuild it with AI is another. That is where Max comes in, an engineer who has been shipping production agentic systems and gives the team the technical firepower to turn the insight into a product. Together, the three cover the full arc: the operations, the buyers, and the technology.
The opportunity
Walk into any large European enterprise and roughly one in four people working there is not an employee. External workers, contractors, freelancers and service providers now represent 20 to 25% of the workforce across European enterprises (Staffing Industry Analysts), and in some organisations well over half. Work is being unbundled from employment.
Yet the systems managing this spend have barely moved in a decade. Enterprises rely on legacy vendor management platforms, some dating back to 1999, that record spend but automate almost nothing, with satisfaction scores deeply negative across the category. To make them work, enterprises bolt on Managed Service Providers, human-led teams charging 3 to 5% of external spend to coordinate hiring, compliance and delivery by hand. Hiring a single contractor typically takes weeks. It is a market hiding in plain sight: hundreds of billions in annual spend, too operational for most software founders to notice, too complex for outsiders to crack.
What is Sherpa building?
Sherpa is the first agentic-native external workforce platform. Rather than another system of record, its AI agents actually run the workflows: scoping requirements, classifying worker types, sourcing and screening candidates, coordinating approvals and onboarding, monitoring delivery and spend. It sits as an invisible layer within the existing enterprise stack, no rip-and-replace required. The workflow below shows how agents run every phase of an external engagement, from intake through to pay and manage.
The ambition is to automate around 80% of the work MSPs perform today and cut hiring cycles from roughly 25 days to 5, shifting external workforce management from a reactive, human-coordinated process to an always-on, agent-driven system. The contrast with the status quo speaks for itself.
Three things convinced us
When we first met Tristan, the connection was almost instant and meeting Tim and Max only reinforced it. We walked away from those conversations convinced that this team was onto something, the quality of their insight was outstanding, and that we had to be part of their journey.
- The founder-market fit is rare. Tristan, Tim and Max combine operator knowledge of this market with the technical ability to rebuild it. Buyers recognise immediately that this team has lived the problem.
- The timing is right. Enterprises are under real pressure to cut coordination costs and gain control over external spend, and agentic AI has only recently become capable of executing these workflows end to end. Incumbents, constrained by legacy architectures and service-led business models, cannot respond quickly.
- Enterprise pull is already visible. Pre-launch, Sherpa has secured a design partnership with a global pharmaceutical leader and is in active conversations with several of Europe's largest enterprises. That access, this early, is telling.
At Brighteye, we believe the bottleneck in the future of work is shifting from finding talent to coordinating, governing and executing external work at scale. Marketplaces solved discovery; Sherpa is building the operating infrastructure for what comes after. We are excited to back Tristan, Tim and Max at pre-seed, and we suspect this is a category people will wish they had seen earlier.
We are proud to invest alongside Seedcamp, DN Capital and Activant, and look forward to seeing where this goes!
