Rightbrain AI raises £3M to help services firms deploy AI agents
What's the deal? Rightbrain AI, a Newcastle-founded startup, has raised £3M ($4M) in a seed round led by NPIF II – PXN Equity Finance to help SMEs and mid-market services firms deploy AI without costly infrastructure overhauls.
Existing investors Salica and NYDIG also participated, alongside four new angel investors. The round was managed by PXN Ventures as part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II.
Rightbrain's platform acts as a software bridge, letting businesses like marketing agencies, recruitment firms, and professional services companies access AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google within their existing tools — CRMs, Google Workspace, and the like. Teams can automate repetitive tasks such as lead research, onboarding, customer feedback analysis, and compliance reviews without changing how they work.
The startup also offers a white-label partner programme, allowing consultancies and digital agencies to build and deploy AI agents for their own clients. Rightbrain says this can shorten time-to-market by six to nine months.
Why now? Many organisations experimenting with off-the-shelf AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are hitting walls around compliance, data security, and integration with legacy systems. Until now, the alternative was investing in expensive bespoke builds. Rightbrain positions itself as the middle path — secure, compliant, and ready to plug in.
Founded in June 2023 by Peter Cheyne and Matt Wells, the company plans to use the funding for strategic hires, scaling its partner programme in the UK and internationally, and deploying its own AI tools to identify and convert new customers.
What could go wrong? The AI agent space is getting crowded fast. Rightbrain's success depends on whether it can differentiate its "agents-as-a-service" model from a growing field of competitors — including the very foundation model providers whose technology it builds on. If OpenAI or Google push deeper into enterprise tooling, the bridge Rightbrain offers could become redundant.
There's also the challenge of selling AI adoption to SMEs, a segment historically cautious about new technology spending and often lacking the internal capacity to manage even simplified AI workflows.
The signal: With NPIF II — a government-backed fund designed to channel capital into Northern England — leading the round, Rightbrain's raise underscores growing institutional appetite for AI-enablement plays outside London. The startup's bet is that the real value in the AI stack increasingly sits not in the models themselves but in the integration layer that makes them usable for services firms lacking in-house technical teams — a vast, underserved market segment where switching costs, once established, can be high.
Read more: uktechnews.info
