## New Startups Building AI Agents Get Big Money Deals

This week in the startup world, exciting news shows that companies are betting huge amounts of money on AI agent technology. Two brand new companies just announced they received millions of dollars from investors who believe in their ideas. An AI agent is computer software that can understand what you want and then do the work for you without you having to give it many instructions. Think of it like having a really smart helper who knows how to do many different jobs.

## Kana Helps Marketers with AI Agents

A new company called Kana started in San Francisco, United States, and just came out to tell everyone about their business this week. The company raised $15 million from investors who want to support their mission. Kana makes AI agents that can help people who work in marketing. Marketers are people whose job is to tell customers about products using ads and social media. Instead of doing everything by hand, Kana's AI agents can look at information about who might want to buy something, make plans for ads, and track if the ads are working well. The company says its AI agents can do many different jobs all at the same time. The people who started Kana have been building marketing technology for more than 25 years, so they really know what marketing people need. One cool thing about Kana is that people can still make choices about what the AI agents do, so the humans stay in control.

## Sphinx Helps Banks Follow the Rules

Another company called Sphinx is using AI agents to help banks and financial companies do their work better. Sphinx raised $7 million in funding to keep building its technology. Financial companies have to follow lots of rules from the government to make sure customers are safe and honest. These rules have names like AML and KYC, which are short ways to say "check for bad money" and "know who your customer is." Sphinx's AI agents can do these checking jobs automatically, which saves people a lot of time so they can do more important work that really needs a human thinking. The AI agents work right inside the computer systems that banks already use every day, so banks don't have to completely change how they work.

## AI Agents Are Becoming Really Popular

These two companies are not alone. Many big technology companies around the world are now building AI agents because everyone can see how powerful they are. Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, and other big companies are all making AI agents that can do amazing things like writing computer code, giving advice about taxes, and even helping doctors figure out what medicine patients need. One big artificial intelligence company called OpenAI even bought another company that makes AI agents, which shows how serious these big companies are about this technology.

## Some People Worry About Jobs

However, some people are worried about this rapid change in AI agents. Some workers in different jobs are nervous that AI agents might do their job instead of them. People who write software code, work in accounting, and even lawyers are thinking about how AI will affect their work. But some experts who study how technology changes jobs say that jobs usually change and grow instead of just disappearing completely. They compare this to the past when computers first came, and people thought many people would lose jobs, but instead new types of jobs were created instead.

## Huge Money Being Put Into AI Agents

The amount of money going into AI right now is stunning. The very biggest AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX's xAI division are getting money in the billions of dollars to build their technology. Over $700 billion will be spent on AI infrastructure by big tech companies in 2026 alone. This shows that people around the world are very confident that AI agents will become a normal part of how businesses work in the future. Even though this much money is a lot, some investors say that companies should spend even more because the technology is changing so fast.

## What This Means for the Future

The startup world this week shows that AI agents are no longer just an idea that people talk about—they are real technology that businesses are actually using right now. Companies like Kana and Sphinx are building products that real customers can buy and use to do their work better. This is different from just talking about what AI could do someday. As more startups build AI agents for different types of work, and as more investors give them money, we will see more and more AI agents helping people work in 2026 and the years after.