Ampersand Raises $15M Series A to Connect AI Agents to Enterprise Software

Ampersand, a San Francisco startup building the integration layer that lets AI agents work inside enterprise software, has raised a $15 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The company announced the round with participation from Matrix, Flex Capital, Yelp, Tenacity Capital, CTO Fund, Mana Ventures and angel investors.

Bessemer partner Lauri Moore is joining Ampersand's board as part of the deal.

What Ampersand Does

AI agents are only useful to a business if they can reach the systems where its data lives. For most companies, that means systems of record such as CRMs and ERPs, software that in many cases was designed long before anyone imagined an AI agent reading from it and writing to it.

Ampersand provides the infrastructure that makes those connections work. Software companies building AI products use it to let their agents read and write inside their customers' legacy systems, without having to build and maintain each integration themselves.

The company has also launched Andi, an AI integration agent that helps developers with implementation work across different customer environments, where every deployment is configured a little differently.

Why Integrations Are the Bottleneck

Getting an agent to pull a record from a CRM in a demo is simple. Doing it reliably across hundreds of customers, each with custom fields, permissions and rate limits, is a different problem. Writing data back is harder still, because an error can corrupt records a business depends on.

Moore made that point in the announcement. "An agent is only as useful as the systems it can reach," she said. "Connecting an agent to a system of record is a demo. Keeping that connection alive across hundreds of customers, with writes you can't afford to get wrong, is much harder."

That gap between demo and production is a major reason enterprise AI projects move slowly. Engineering teams end up spending their time on integration plumbing when they would prefer to be building the product itself.

The Founders Behind Ampersand

Ampersand was co-founded by CEO Ayan Barua and Lauren Long. Barua was previously co-founder and CTO of Siftery, which was acquired by G2. Long built Firebase Extensions at Google.

Among the company's customers is Hatch, an AI communications platform for service businesses that was acquired by Yelp in 2026. Yelp is also an investor in this round.

Why the Ampersand Funding Matters

Much of the investment in AI agents has gone to the models and to the applications built on them. Less visible, and increasingly important, is the middle layer that connects agents to the software companies already run on.

Enterprises are not going to replace their CRM or ERP to accommodate AI. Those systems hold years of data and are woven into daily operations. Agents will have to work with them as they are, which makes dependable integration a requirement for any AI product sold to large companies.

Ampersand is betting that this layer is best bought, not built. For a startup selling AI software, handing off integrations means faster deployments and fewer engineers tied up in maintenance.

With $15 million and Bessemer on its board, the company has the resources to expand the systems it supports and to prove that its infrastructure holds up at enterprise scale.

Source

PR Newswire — "Ampersand Closes Generation Gap Between Agents and Enterprise Software Stack, Backed by $15M from Bessemer Venture Partners"