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IFS snaps up AI agent platform vendor TheLoops

IFS beefs up its industrial AI agentic capabilities by acquiring TheLoops.

Jim O'Donnell
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Published: 02 Jul 2025

Industrial ERP vendor IFS is expanding its agentic AI capabilities with the acquisition of Silicon Valley startup TheLoops.

Former SAP and ServiceNow executive Somya Kapoor and startup veteran Ravi Bulusu founded TheLoops in 2020 in San Mateo, Calif. The company provides an AI agent platform designed to help enterprises deploy agents that can perform complex processes.

Terms were not disclosed, and the deal is expected to close by the end of 2025.

TheLoops started as a way to improve AI chatbot technology by developing AI agents that can solve complex problems that often require interactivity among multiple back-end enterprise systems, according to Kapoor, who will stay on as CEO at TheLoops.

The first use cases for TheLoops' AI agent platform were in CX, but the acquisition by IFS will enable it to bring the capabilities to more complex industrial processes in IFS applications for field service management (FSM) and enterprise application management (EAM), Kapoor said. IFS became aware of TheLoops' capabilities as a customer when it used the platform in its support operations.

For example, TheLoops' agentic AI platform can be used to deliver "digital co-worker" abilities on manufacturing floors through the IFS Poka connected worker platform, she said.

"This is about how you can go beyond just assistance to truly taking on skills of a persona within an environment," Kapoor said. "This eventually leads to autonomous agents, because we've learned enough to completely automate skills that a human does, while keeping humans in the loop as well."

TheLoops expects to build a number of prepacked AI agents that are specific for IFS aerospace industry customers, she said. But TheLoops also has an Agent Studio that enables customers to build or extend their own agents.

"There's also a monitoring layer for the evaluation of every agent that you provide," Kapoor said. "There will be a supervisor agent available to monitor those agents to see if they are performing the task based on the rules and the definitions that you provide."

All 37 TheLoops employees are now part of IFS, she said, and IFS is planning to invest in developing the platform, including expanding connections to other enterprise platforms.

"Before joining IFS, we had about 75 connectors in the platform, including to ServiceNow, Salesforce and other enterprise systems," Kapoor said. "We're going to continue to expand our footprint on more connectors around the ERP and the industrial AI space."

TheLoops joins several other recent IFS acquisitions that include asset investment planning vendor Copperleaf in 2024, industrial AI provider Falkonry and connected worker platform provider Poka in 2023, EAM vendor Ultimo in 2022, and enterprise service management vendor Axios Systems in 2021.

Further expansion of IFS capabilities

The acquisition of TheLoops appears to be a solid fit for IFS by adding agentic AI technology it had previously lacked, according to analysts.

TheLoops started out in CX, but it's taking advantage of the agentic AI platform capabilities to deliver the same capabilities for IFS on supply chain, core ERP, EAM and FSM, according to R "Ray" Wang, principal analyst and founder of Constellation Research.

"What TheLoops did was show that they could deliver on the CX use case," Wang said. "IFS was interested in TheLoops because of the platform, and customers expect agentic AI to usher a wave of decision automation [capabilities]."

IFS has a long history of predictive analytics capabilities for preventive maintenance that it referred to as AI, but it was lacking in autonomous agents, said Predrag Jakovljevic, principal industry analyst at Technology Evaluation Centers.

"This could help them catch up, at least," Jakovljevic said. "The key word is industrial, so with IFS' know-how in these asset-intensive industries, they might be able to come up with some good value prop there."

The addition of TheLoops' agentic AI platform might help IFS beef up the performance and know-how of its EAM and FSM applications, he said. This might not be enough to surpass heavyweight competition like SAP, Oracle or Microsoft Dynamics, but it should certainly enable IFS to defend its industrial ERP strongholds.

"The big deal is introducing AI agents that will have full contextual insights and semantic understanding of industry-specific business, processes, people, assets and customers," Jakovljevic said. "It's like hiring a supersmart person straight from college that will understand most things about a business from day one."

Jim O'Donnell is a news director for Informa TechTarget who covers ERP and other enterprise applications.

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