SAN FRANCISCO — Aug. 17, 2026 — Xpander announced a $7.5 million Seed round led by Pico Venture Partners, with participation from Emerge Ventures, Samsung Next, and SeedIL. The company also introduced Omni, its enterprise AI agent and "agentic Forward Deployed Engineer," which scored 90.9% on the GAIA benchmark.

The Founders

Xpander was founded in 2024 by three former AWS Principal Engineers: David Twizer (CEO), Moriel Pahima (CTO), and Ran Sheinberg (CPO). Their pitch draws directly on that background — Twizer described the founders' experience helping large enterprises navigate complex, multi-year cloud migrations at AWS as the inspiration for building a platform that smooths the equivalent transition into AI.

The Problem They're Targeting

The release cites McKinsey data showing that 88% of organizations already use AI in at least one business function, yet only around 1% describe their deployments as mature, with roughly two-thirds still stuck in pilots. Xpander's thesis is that AI is too often bolted onto existing workflows as a point solution rather than treated as infrastructure a business can actually build on — and that gap in infrastructure, security and governance is what's keeping most enterprises stuck.

What the Platform Does

Xpander positions itself as a vendor-neutral, all-in-one AI enablement platform that works across major cloud environments and AI models, letting enterprises adopt, build, run and manage AI agents without reworking their existing infrastructure or compromising on security, compliance and regulatory requirements.

At the center of the platform is what the company calls a universal agent harness — a model-, framework- and cloud-agnostic runtime that executes AI agents as portable workloads inside a customer's own environment, while securely rendering agent interfaces on demand. That same infrastructure also powers governance, giving organizations centralized visibility and lifecycle management as they build and deploy production-grade agentic applications across products, workflows and data.

Its flagship agent, Omni, is designed to let companies create an AI teammate for every employee, let every team build its own agents, or embed AI directly into every process — while also supporting collaborative multi-agent workflows. Both the platform and Omni are live now at chat.xpander.ai, and the company says it already has enterprise customers across retail, manufacturing, financial services, technology and government.

The Investor's Take

Pico Venture Partners General Partner Tal Yatsiv said the market is "inflated with point solutions but lacking platforms that enable true enterprise-wide AI transformation," and pointed to the founding team's experience and early customer traction as the deciding factor behind the firm's investment.

Why It's Worth Watching

For founders and operators tracking enterprise AI infrastructure, Xpander's raise is another data point in a familiar pattern this year: investors backing the "picks and shovels" layer — governance, orchestration, portability — rather than another vertical AI application. Xpander is SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR compliant, headquartered in San Francisco.

About Xpander: Founded in 2024 by former AWS Principal Engineers David Twizer, Moriel Pahima and Ran Sheinberg, xpander.ai provides a vendor-neutral platform that enables enterprises to build, deploy and govern AI agents across any model, cloud or framework. More information is available at xpander.ai.

Source: PR Newswire