London-based Sagittal AI, a company that develops AI solutions designed to align with human workflows, has raised $2.2M (nearly €1.99M) in a pre-seed funding round.
The round was led by Twin Path Ventures, with participation from SineWave Ventures, Fuel Ventures, Blue Lake VC, and angel investor Husayn Kassai, founder of Onfido and Quench AI.
Transforming AI approaches in software development
Sagittal AI is a company that creates AI tools designed to work with how people already do their jobs, rather than requiring people to change how they work to suit the AI. It was started in 2023 by Michael Smith and José Palazon, who previously worked at companies like Google, SwiftKey, Telefónica, and Yahoo.
The company’s main product, Neo, is used in software development. Unlike some current AI tools that either focus on helping individual developers type code faster or try to complete entire projects on their own, Neo connects to the tools teams already use and works throughout the entire development process.
This avoids the need for developers to manually copy and paste information between systems or take on support roles for AI systems.
Neo fits into established team workflows, such as Agile, and helps teams delegate complete tasks without changing how they already work. It reduces the need to switch between tools and allows teams to assign tasks using their usual project management platforms, instead of relying on AI inside coding environments.
In short, Sagittal AI offers a new way for companies to use AI in software development by focusing on collaboration, task automation, and integration with existing tools and practices.
Michael Smith, CEO and co-founder, says, “Despite millions invested in AI development tools, most companies can’t identify any measurable improvement in the metrics that actually matter. That’s because current solutions force developers to become shackled to the AI, manually copying requirements, searching for context and navigating between tools. But there’s also a deeper psychological barrier at play—teams are reluctant to delegate to AI due to perfectionism.”
“We’ve built Neo on a critical insight: when integrated throughout the development process, even AI that delivers 80 per cent of the solution creates exponentially more value than perfect AI restricted to a single step. With Neo, you simply assign a task just as you would to any team member, and it delivers results that can be quickly refined rather than built from scratch.”
An early Neo pilot customer reported that tasks taking 2–3 days were completed in under 15 minutes. Neo gathered context from requirements, documentation, and code, then delivered a full implementation with tests and documentation, aligned with team conventions.
Jose Palazon, CTO and co-founder, adds, “The key difference is that Neo acts like a team member, not a tool. Neo drives actual change because it can both operate within your existing workflows and enable new patterns of delegation.”
“When you assign a task to a colleague, you don’t list every file they need to modify or copy-paste specifications from multiple systems—you rely on them to navigate your shared context. Neo works the same way, adapting to your team’s processes rather than demanding humans learn new workflows to accommodate AI’s limitations.”
Capital utilisation
Sagittal AI plans to use the funds to launch and expand Neo, aiming to support the full product development lifecycle and enable teams to delegate entire categories of work to AI.
John Spindler, Partner at Twin Path Ventures, says, “There’s a big gap between claimed AI productivity and measurable results. We invested in Sagittal because they’ve recognised what others have missed or chosen to ignore: that psychological barriers and team dynamics, not technical issues, are preventing AI adoption at scale.”
“Their philosophy of adapting AI to human workflows rather than forcing the reverse represents the important shift enterprise software development has been waiting for to deliver real impact.”
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