SAN FRANCISCO & TORONTO — Feb 17, 2026 — Shakudo, the operating system for enterprise artificial intelligence, announced a $7 million strategic funding round led by Wittington Ventures. The financing—driven by several of Shakudo's long-term enterprise customers—will fuel the company's U.S. expansion and the launch of two new products, Kaji and Shakudo AI Gateway, built to bring autonomous AI agents into the most regulated industries in the world.

The round was led by Wittington Ventures, whose Managing Partner, Jim Orlando, has joined the Shakudo Board of Directors. Wittington Ventures is a venture capital firm affiliated with Loblaw Companies Limited, one of Shakudo's marquee enterprise customers. Existing investors Golden Ventures, GreatPoint Ventures, and RTP Global also participated, reaffirming their support for Shakudo's vision of a secure, vendor-neutral AI future.

Notably, some executive customers who have seen Shakudo's impact firsthand made personal investments in the round: Chris Sullens, CEO of CentralReach; and David Stevens, former Vice President of AI at CentralReach. Their participation signals a growing conviction among enterprise leaders that sovereign AI infrastructure—not vendor-locked cloud solutions—is the path forward.

"Shakudo allows us to accelerate our transparency, visibility, and time to market," said Chris Sullens. "I've also really appreciated having the Shakudo team, engineers, and support people semi-embedded in our team and shoulder-to-shoulder with Dave and his team. This has been hugely helpful to allow us to make the most of the tool."

Why Enterprises Are Moving Beyond Generic AI

Despite the momentum behind consumer-facing AI assistants and big-cloud integrators, most enterprises continue to struggle with adoption. CIOs have spent the last year attempting to push business users toward generic AI tools, only to find they lack the institutional memory, data-connectedness, and security controls required for professional work.

"People don't want another dashboard. They want agents that actually do the work," said Yevgeniy Vahlis, Co-founder and CEO of Shakudo. "But when three engineers install an autonomous agent on three different laptops, that's three knowledge silos, three attack surfaces, three compliance gaps. That's fine for a side project. It's not fine when you're running a nuclear plant, managing patient data, or processing financial transactions."

Shakudo's approach is fundamentally different. The platform is deployed natively within a customer's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), ensuring that intellectual property never leaves the organization. Rather than offering a general-purpose assistant limited to personal productivity, Shakudo turns an enterprise's private data into a proprietary competitive advantage—purpose-built for the power user and the subject matter expert.

David Stevens, who evaluated multiple platforms before selecting Shakudo at CentralReach, described the decision:

"We started looking at some of the big companies, like AWS, and while they're amazing, they lag behind the point solutions that are best of breed, really leading edge. It quickly became apparent that if we went down that legacy path, we were going to be hamstrung in terms of our ability to quickly deliver POCs. We started searching for platforms, and that's when we found Shakudo."

Introducing Kaji and Shakudo AI Gateway

Alongside the funding, Shakudo is launching two products that extend its operating system into the era of autonomous AI agents:

• Kaji is Shakudo's autonomous AI agent, natively integrated into the Shakudo OS and running entirely inside the customer's VPC. With over 200 integrations out of the box and a knowledge graph memory that persists across sessions and teams—not markdown files on someone's laptop—Kaji can perform deep-work tasks that generic assistants cannot: contract review, deep research, recruiting outreach, sales proposals, customer intelligence via graph RAG, project management, and team performance tracking. It works with Claude, GPT, Gemini, or self-hosted models. In early usage with a major logistics partner, Kaji autonomously improved a machine learning model for chassis prediction accuracy by 49% without human intervention.
• Shakudo AI Gateway provides a single control plane for every model and agent in an organization. It enforces parameter policies, strips PII before tokens leave the enterprise perimeter, and maintains immutable audit logs across any LLM provider. The market is full of security layers that bolt onto existing tools and agent platforms that hand you an empty canvas and wish you luck. Kaji and the AI Gateway take a different approach—they are built into the same OS that already runs data and AI infrastructure for organizations in nuclear, healthcare, financial services, oil and gas, railway, and manufacturing, giving compliance and security teams the governance layer they need.

Both products are built into the same OS that already runs data and AI infrastructure for organizations in nuclear energy, healthcare, financial services, oil and gas, railway, and manufacturing.

Strategic U.S. Expansion

With the establishment of its new headquarters in San Francisco, Shakudo is scaling its go-to-market and engineering teams to support a growing roster of U.S.-based Fortune 500 customers. The company remains committed to its mission: enabling the world's most regulated industries to adopt AI on their own terms, in their own clouds, with their own data.

About Shakudo

Shakudo provides the operating system for AI, enabling enterprises to build, deploy, and scale AI applications on their own infrastructure. By unifying data tools, security, and institutional context into a single sovereign layer, Shakudo allows organizations to move from experiment to execution without compromising their data or their future.

Shakudo is growing fast—and we're looking for exceptional people to help build the future of enterprise AI. If you want to do the most important work of your career alongside world-class talent, we'd love to hear from you. See open roles.