The past week has shown that AI agents are becoming one of the hottest areas for startup funding and innovation worldwide.

Game Marketing Gets Smart AI Help

One of the biggest funding stories this week involves Sett, an Israeli startup that uses AI agents to help video game companies with marketing. The company just raised $30 million in a big funding round led by Greenfield Partners. Sett has customers like Zynga, Playtika, and Papaya, which are well-known game makers. The company's AI agents can create marketing content and advertisements so fast that jobs that used to take weeks now take just hours. This saves game companies millions and sometimes tens of millions of dollars every year. The company was started in 2023 and is already making tens of millions of dollars in revenue, which is very fast growth for such a young company. Sett plans to expand beyond games into other businesses like fintech, apps, and e-commerce by the end of 2026.

Understanding Business Secrets with AI

Another important startup announcement came from Interloom, a German company that raised $16.5 million this week. Interloom is working on a big problem: most business knowledge is not written down anywhere. For example, when an experienced worker gets a tough customer question, they know how to solve it not from a manual, but from their experience. Interloom's founder says about 70% of important business decisions have never been formally documented. The startup is building AI agents that can capture this secret knowledge so that the agents can make better decisions. Their new product will let managers see in real-time how their AI agents are working, which is like having a control panel for AI helpers.

One-Person Businesses Boom in China

China is experiencing an exciting wave of one-person companies powered by AI agents. The president of Alibaba.com said he has seen this growth firsthand and estimates that 30 to 40% of the platform's customers are solo entrepreneurs. These are people who run entire businesses by themselves with help from AI agents instead of hiring employees. Alibaba recently launched a tool called Accio Work, an AI agent designed for small businesses, that can handle customer service, taxes, marketing, and shipping. This tool now has 10 million active users every month. A popular open-source AI agent called OpenClaw became wildly popular in China and helped teach people about AI agents.

AI Agents Transform Shopping and Banking

Perhaps the most impressive number this week involves money: AI agents influenced $262 billion in holiday sales during the 2025 holiday season. This is huge because it shows AI agents are not just helping workers—they are changing how people buy things. Companies like Visa and Mastercard are now building AI agents that can complete purchases automatically. The report shows that AI agents accounted for 20% of all retail sales in the United States. Banks and companies that are not ready for AI agents are going to be left behind.

Big Tech Companies Invest in AI Agents

OpenAI is backing a startup called Isara with $94 million in funding. Isara is building software that lets thousands of AI agents communicate with each other and solve very complex problems together. Meanwhile, Oracle, a giant technology company, announced new AI database tools this week called Oracle AI Database 26ai. These tools give AI agents better memory so they can remember important information and make smarter decisions.

The Bigger Picture

A report from Accenture and Wharton studied how AI agents affect 18 different industries and found something interesting: as AI agents get smarter, human experts become even more important, not less important. Miro, a $17.5 billion company that makes productivity software, is now adding AI agents to help teams work together. Industry experts predict that by the end of 2026, 40% of all enterprise applications will use task-specific AI agents. Harness, a company that uses AI for software delivery, was just named one of Fortune's America's Most Innovative Companies for their work with AI agents. All of this shows that AI agents are quickly becoming the normal way that companies around the world do their work.