Two former Palantir employees who helped build the company’s AI platform have emerged from stealth with $30 million and Sequoia Capital leading the charge.

Edra, founded by Eugen Alpeza and Yannis Karamanlakis, mines the operational data companies already sit on — support tickets, emails, logs, chat histories — and converts it into living knowledge bases that power AI agents. The context layer enterprise AI has been missing.

The Palantir pedigree runs deep. Alpeza spent seven years there, building commercial accounts and launching Palantir’s AI Platform under CEO Alex Karp. Karamanlakis was the company’s first Forward Deployed AI Engineer — the role Palantir created to get models out of demos and into production. The two met at university 13 years ago.

The gap they’re filling is specific. Palantir sells to governments and massive enterprises at enormous scale. Edra is going after the messy middle: companies with useful data locked in operational systems but no way to make AI act on it. Its sweet spot so far is IT service management and customer support, where HubSpot, ASOS, Cushman & Wakefield, and easyJet are already paying customers.

Sequoia partner Luciana Lixandru pointed to the founders’ complementary strengths — Alpeza’s commercial instincts paired with Karamanlakis’s technical depth — as a key factor in the firm’s decision to lead the $23.8 million Series A. 8VC and Kevin Hartz’s A* led the earlier $6.5 million seed.

The bet: enterprise AI needs context, not just capability. Edra is building the plumbing.

Sources