Former AWS principal engineers launch Xpander to overcome the challenges enterprises are facing when aiming to become AI-native and to enable AI utilization at unparalleled scale
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Xpander today announced a $7.5 million Seed round led by Pico Venture Partners with participation from Emerge Ventures, Samsung Next, and SeedIL. The funding will be used to accelerate Xpander’s market penetration with its turnkey, vendor-neutral, all-in-one AI enablement platform. The company also introduced Omni, its enterprise AI agent, which achieved a 90.9% score on the GAIA benchmark.
Xpander was founded by David Twizer, Ran Sheinberg, and Moriel Pahima to allow enterprises to harness the true power of AI by freely adopting, building, running, and managing AI agents without needing to adjust infrastructures or compromise security, compliance, and regulatory requirements.
Enterprise AI adoption is now universal, but meaningful deployment remains limited as organizations struggle to adapt their existing workflows and infrastructure to AI-driven operations. According to McKinsey, 88% of organizations use AI in at least one business function, yet only around 1% describe their deployments as mature and roughly two-thirds remain stuck in pilots. Due to this and despite its potential, AI is more often viewed as a tool bolted onto existing workflows instead of a foundation that allows businesses to build on and scale.
Xpander bridges this gap, helping organizations overcome the infrastructure, security, and governance challenges that have historically limited enterprise AI adoption. Its platform seamlessly integrates into any company’s operations and is available across major cloud environments and AI models, enabling the AI-native foundation for any business. Xpander enhances productivity and efficiency, without hindering scale, speed, and flexibility.
Instead of organizations limiting their AI adoption to off-the-shelf tools or by adding restrictions, Xpander’s customers use Omni, its flagship agentic Forward Deployed Engineer, to achieve full flexibility with AI. Whether creating an AI teammate for every employee, enabling every team to build its own agents, or ensuring every process is with AI built in, Omni simplifies the most complex user tasks into simple and autonomous, while also supporting collaborative multi-agent workflows to meet business objectives.
“Every company is working to harness the power of AI and become AI-native, yet most find it unattainable,” said David Twizer, CEO and co-founder of Xpander. “Our experience at AWS, helping large enterprises move to the cloud in complex multi-year projects, has inspired us to build a platform that smoothly facilitates AI migration and adoption for organizations, to allow them to grow their businesses faster than ever before.”
“We are excited to join Xpander’s journey in solving the biggest problem that enterprises and decision makers are facing when attempting to adopt AI,” said Tal Yatsiv, General Partner at Pico Venture Partners. “The market is inflated with point solutions but lacking platforms that enable true enterprise-wide AI transformation. We chose Xpander due to the team’s unique experience and expertise and their proven early results. With diverse customers using the platform successfully, it was clear to us that Xpander is positioned to lead this critical category.”
At the core of Xpander’s platform is its universal agent harness, a model, framework, and cloud-agnostic runtime that executes AI agents as portable workloads within a customer’s own environment while securely rendering agent interfaces on demand. The same infrastructure that gives enterprises deployment flexibility also powers governance. Organizations can rapidly build, deploy, and manage production-grade custom agentic applications across their products, workflows, and data, with centralized visibility and lifecycle management built in.
The platform is already driving real impact for Xpander’s customers, which include global enterprises across the retail, manufacturing, financial services, technology, and government sectors.
Both the platform and Omni are available today at http://chat.xpander.ai/. Omni’s full GAIA benchmark results and methodology are available at github.com/xpander-ai/xpander-ai-gaia-results.
About Xpander
Founded in 2024 by former AWS Principal Engineers David Twizer (CEO), Moriel Pahima (CTO), and Ran Sheinberg (CPO), xpander.ai provides a vendor-neutral platform that enables enterprises to build, deploy, and govern AI agents across any model, cloud, or framework. The company also developed Omni, its flagship agent and agentic Forward Deployed Engineer, which helps organizations rapidly build and manage production-grade AI applications. xpander.ai is SOC 2 Type II certified, GDPR compliant, and headquartered in San Francisco, California.
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SOURCE Xpander