# Sapiom raises $35 million Series A to optimize AI token costs for startups

> Sapiom has raised a $35 million Series A led by Dragonfly Capital, following a $15 million seed led by Accel earlier in 2026. The pitch is simple and increasingly urgent: many startups are burning through cash paying frontier-model prices, and Sapiom automatically routes each request to the cheapest model that can handle it, taking no markup on the compute. The savings can be dramatic. Sapiom says one customer, Polsia, cut its Anthropic spending from roughly $1.2 million to about $100,000 a month after optimization. Founder Ilan Zerbib argues bluntly that deploying at full frontier prices is just unsustainable for most companies. The startup runs its own infrastructure in San Jose to make the routing work. It is a bet that as AI moves from demos to production, the winners will not always be the biggest models but the smartest ways of deciding when you actually need them, a business that only makes sense in a world of many competing models.

_Section: [AI Funding Tracker](https://www.wortins.com/funding) · Source: Semafor · Published Thursday, August 6, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Sapiom has raised a $35 million Series A led by Dragonfly Capital, following a $15 million seed led by Accel earlier in 2026. The pitch is simple and increasingly urgent: many startups are burning through cash paying frontier-model prices, and Sapiom automatically routes each request to the cheapest model that can handle it, taking no markup on the compute. The savings can be dramatic. Sapiom says one customer, Polsia, cut its Anthropic spending from roughly $1.2 million to about $100,000 a month after optimization. Founder Ilan Zerbib argues bluntly that deploying at full frontier prices is just unsustainable for most companies. The startup runs its own infrastructure in San Jose to make the routing work. It is a bet that as AI moves from demos to production, the winners will not always be the biggest models but the smartest ways of deciding when you actually need them, a business that only makes sense in a world of many competing models.

## Source

[Read the full story at Semafor](https://www.semafor.com/article/08/05/2026/startup-sapiom-routes-clients-ai-to-lowest-cost-tokens)

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