Cernel, a Copenhagen-based AI startup building what it calls an agentic commerce platform, has closed a EUR 4 million seed round in just four weeks. The round was led by byFounders with participation from PreSeed Ventures and a group of angel investors that includes former executives from Maersk, Pandora, and Zendesk. The speed of the close, from first meeting to wire transfer in under a month, reflects both the quality of the founding team and the market appetite for AI applications that sit directly on revenue-generating business processes.

Agentic commerce is a term you are going to hear a lot more. It describes AI systems that do not just recommend or assist but actually execute purchasing decisions, negotiate with suppliers, manage procurement workflows, and optimize spend autonomously. Cernel is betting it can own the commerce-specific slice of that market, joining a growing wave of Nordic AI infrastructure startups building applications on top of foundation models.

The core product is a platform that deploys AI agents to handle repetitive B2B purchasing processes. Think of the thousands of routine procurement decisions a mid-size company makes every month: reordering office supplies, comparing quotes from approved vendors, processing purchase orders, reconciling invoices. Each of these tasks follows predictable patterns that a well-trained AI agent can handle faster and more consistently than a human procurement team.

Cernel's agents integrate with existing ERP and procurement systems through APIs, ingest historical purchasing data, and learn the company's spending patterns, vendor preferences, and approval thresholds. Once configured, the agents can autonomously execute purchases below certain dollar thresholds, surface anomalies for human review, and negotiate better terms by comparing real-time market pricing across vendor catalogs.

The founding team has direct experience with this problem. CEO Mads Thorsen spent eight years at Maersk leading supply chain digitization, and CTO Lena Soerensen built machine learning systems at Zendesk that automated customer service workflows. They argue that procurement is the largest untapped opportunity for agentic AI because the processes are structured, the data is clean, and the cost of human labor for routine purchasing decisions is disproportionately high.

Seed rounds typically take two to four months to close. Cernel did it in four weeks. The speed tells you several things about the current fundraising environment for AI startups in the Nordics.

First, the investor base for Nordic AI companies has matured significantly. byFounders, the lead investor, has built a dedicated AI thesis and can move quickly when a deal fits their criteria. PreSeed Ventures, which focuses on pre-revenue Nordic tech, has similarly streamlined its evaluation process for teams with strong domain expertise and clear technical differentiation.

Second, the agentic AI category is attracting disproportionate investor attention globally. VCs who missed the first waves of generative AI investment are looking for the next application layer, and autonomous business process agents are emerging as a category with clear enterprise demand. Cernel's focus on commerce and procurement gives it a defined market and measurable ROI story that makes investor conversations more straightforward.

Global B2B procurement spend exceeds $10 trillion annually. The vast majority of that spend is managed through a combination of spreadsheets, email chains, and legacy procurement systems that automate very little of the actual decision-making process. Enterprise software companies like SAP Ariba and Coupa have digitized the workflow, but the purchasing decisions themselves still require human judgment.

Cernel's thesis is that 60-80% of routine procurement decisions can be fully automated by AI agents within three years. The EUR 4 million will fund product development through the first paying customers and an initial go-to-market push targeting mid-market Danish and Swedish companies. Cernel expects to have 10-15 paying pilot customers by the end of 2026 and plans to raise a Series A in early 2027 to expand across the Nordics and into the German market.

Cernel's raise also highlights Copenhagen's growing strength as an AI startup center. The city has traditionally been overshadowed by Stockholm in Nordic tech, but a combination of strong university programs, proximity to the Oresund research corridor, and an improving venture capital ecosystem has attracted a new wave of AI-focused founders. The city's startup community, boosted by institutions like Founders House, is creating the connective tissue that early-stage companies need.

For Cernel, the immediate challenge is straightforward: build a product that works reliably enough for enterprise customers to trust AI agents with real purchasing authority. That is a higher bar than building an AI assistant that makes recommendations. When an AI agent autonomously commits your company to a $50,000 purchase order, the accuracy and reliability requirements are fundamentally different from a chatbot that suggests products.

If Cernel can clear that bar, the four-week fundraise will look like just the beginning. If procurement AI turns out to be harder to deploy reliably than the demos suggest, the seed round will have bought the founders roughly 18 months to figure out why. Either way, agentic commerce as a category is here, and Copenhagen just produced one of its first dedicated players.