Consulting in 2026 is a $1 trillion industry where some of our best-educated minds spend a significant share of their time manually re-assembling work that already exists, inside tools that have not fundamentally changed since the 1990s.

Both McKinsey and Bain have described AI transformation as existential for the profession, and they have invested heavily, McKinsey in Lilli, BCG in its internal slide AI tool which has since been used over 450,000 times.

Mid-market consulting firms are large enough to need enterprise-grade AI, too small to build it in-house. They have watched Harvey transform legal services and Rogo do the same for investment banking. They have been waiting for their equivalent.

That is the gap Riplo is entering. Built by Oliver Scott, Tobias Haefele and Zack Zornitta, Riplo acts as the operating system for consulting teams, embedding into the workflows that shape how firms create, structure, and reuse work. Cherry Ventures led a $3.1m pre-seed round, joined by Blue Lion Capital, the founders of QuantumBlack, and notable angels from places including OpenAI and Goldman Sachs.

Building the Agentic Operating System

General AI tools were not built for consulting. They sit outside the core workflow, producing output in a chat window that has to be manually transferred and reformatted. They also have no knowledge of how a specific firm works, how it structures its arguments, what templates it uses, and how it talks to clients. So every proposal still starts from scratch.

Riplo operates differently. It connects to a firm's existing materials, past proposals, slide libraries, internal templates, and other internal knowledge, then uses that context directly inside the workflows where teams already work. No new tool to learn. No loss of control. The firm's existing way of working remains the source of truth.

As Riplo embeds into how a firm creates and reuses its work, it becomes the intelligence system underneath every deliverable. The wedge creates the moat, and Riplo has solid early traction, proving that firms will pay seriously for the right tool.

The Team Behind It

Riplo comes out of a very specific place. All three founders had already spent time inside the same failure mode, consulting firms generate huge amounts of high-quality thinking, but struggle to reuse it in the moments that matter.

Tobias Haefele and Oliver Scott first worked on this inside QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI arm, building internal tooling and seeing how often teams rebuilt work from scratch despite having near-identical material somewhere in the firm. Oliver had seen the same inefficiency from the operator side before joining McKinsey, after building and exiting a multi-location consumer business.

They later met Zack Zornitta at Hg Capital. Zack had spent over two years at BCG before moving into engineering, with direct exposure to how proposals are built, reviewed, and won.

Across consulting, AI, and systems, each had seen the same pattern up close. Riplo is a direct response to that shared experience.

When a team arrives at the same problem from different directions and ends up building the same thing, it tends to show up in how quickly they move and how clearly they prioritise.

Why We're Backing Them

As we’ve mentioned before, software is being revalued based on whether it executes outcomes or coordinates work. A copilot that suggests edits and a system that generates a client-ready proposal from firm context are not the same product. One is a feature. The other is a business. Riplo is building the latter.

As more of the underlying work becomes automatable, the boundary between software and services starts to blur. Winning tools will take on responsibility for real outputs, not just assist in producing them. In consulting, that starts with proposals, but doesn’t end there.

If Riplo becomes the agentic operating system that captures how a firm structures its thinking and applies it across new engagements, it moves closer to that line and shapes how client work itself gets assembled and delivered.