At AGNTCon Europe, Agentic AI Startups Focus on Control and Business Use

The report said the pace of innovation in the emerging agentic AI market is outrunning adoption, yet there were plenty of bona fide paying customer stories. The market remains nascent, with new business models appearing weekly, and it is sometimes hard to distinguish real products from hand-waving. The reporter spoke with most exhibitors and selected seven companies as representative of the balance between customer traction and rapid innovation.

Governance was a starting point for many vendors. Traefik Labs is using its cloud native proxy and ingress controller expertise to offer a combined API, AI and Model Context Protocol gateway, essentially three separate gateway products that share a common binary. By monitoring and controlling all the ways AI agents interact with their environment, Traefik delivers a sovereign trust plane, a unified control plane that provides evidence of agentic behavior in enough detail and with enough trust to meet stringent regulatory, auditing and forensic requirements.

Bluerock Security also draws on pre-AI expertise. The company developed a military-grade microkernel hypervisor that guaranteed data isolation on bare metal. It now offers a governed AI workspace for AI-native builders, including developers and business users working with AI coding agents on their desktops. The workspace acts as an “AI jail” that controls access to models, manages token usage and integrates with enterprise identity management systems. Bluerock also offers agentic code scanning capabilities, extending traditional static application security testing to MCP servers and AI agent skills.

Agentic orchestration was another focus. Orkes, born out of Netflix, uses its history as a massively scalable cloud native orchestration platform to bring controlled orchestration to the agentic era. The platform enables organizations to build deterministic orchestrations, which are less likely to go off the rails, while providing the scalability and durability of the underlying cloud native platform. It also offers explainability, giving operators the ability to inspect and track agentic interactions.

Grape Up has entered the agentic orchestration market with Aiboostr, its AI orchestration and governance platform. Grape Up is perhaps best known for its Europe-based cloud and data management platforms. It uses that expertise in Aiboostr to provide orchestrations that comply with the EU Artificial Intelligence Act. The act requires organizations to maintain inventories of AI capabilities and track each agent’s owner, purpose and users, tasks that Aiboostr’s built-in catalog provides. Both Orkes and Grape Up illustrate that powerful, innovative capabilities require a commensurate focus on control and governance.

Language model plugins were also discussed. Users are accustomed to frontier large language models returning text, images or videos to prompts. With LLM plugins, ChatGPT from OpenAI and Gemini from Google and their peers can return plugins as well. LLM plugins are distributable workflow packages that leverage MCP and can contain reusable skills and apps. Plugins can connect to external data and actions, making capabilities discoverable and easy to install, either on the user’s desktop or as part of an agentic orchestration. Two vendors at AGNTCon touted their LLM plugins.