Why We Invested in Lua

Mid-market enterprises globally hope to leverage the promise of AI agents, but they face a fragmented and confusing tooling landscape. While many of these companies have some level of technical sophistication, they lack the capacity and the expertise to build out the AI toolkit they need. Their current options break down into three boxes: 

1) High-end vertical vendors selling expensive black-box agents resulting in consulting-heavy deployments.

2) Developer frameworks that require significant engineering skill.

3) Lightweight no-code tools that cannot support deeper integrations or multi-step workflows.

These are unsatisfying answers that leave mid-sized businesses without a unified “agent layer” they can own, extend, and scale across the organization. 

Lua has a better solution. Unlike developer frameworks, the London-based, YC-backed company doesn’t require companies to build and maintain their own agent infrastructure. Unlike no-code tools, it supports complex, multi-step workflows deeply integrated into core systems. It operates at the sweet spot for mid-sized businesses.

Lua makes it easy for companies to build, deploy, and own AI agents across their business, getting them to production-ready products in hours or days rather than months. Lua’s self-service APIs allow companies to build on their own. Any team, regardless of technical depth, can create an agent workforce from day one.

Lua is developing the operating system for human and agent collaboration.

“Companies that win will think about their agent workforce like they think about their human workforce,” Co-founder and CEO Lorcan O’Cathain says. “Lua is the HR manager for your agent team.”

We believe there’s a desperate and growing need for this type of solution that will help mid-market businesses grow and compete. That’s why we’re excited to join Lua’s $5.8M Seed round, led by Norrsken22 with participation from 20VC, P1 Ventures, Phosphor Capital and Y Combinator along with notable angels Henri Stern (CEO Privy), Kaz Nejatian (CEO of Opendoor) and Med Benmansour (CEO of Nuitee). This is our first AI investment in Africa, but definitely not our last. Lua has been global from the beginning, winning clients in hospitality, financial services, and other sectors in emerging markets as well as the United States. And they are only getting started.

From Fintech to Agentic AI

Lorcan worked with Co-founder and CTO Stefan Kruger at a Kenyan Fintech lender eight years ago, prior to founding Lua. They helped scale the business from before going their separate ways: Lorcan to Zephyr Management and Stefan to Paystack before the Stripe acquisition. But the duo always wanted to build a business together, continuing to chat and toss around ideas. 

Stefan, an engineer, suggested a two-sided agentic marketplace: sales and support agents for companies on one side and a personal assistant on the other. In March 2025, the pair quit their jobs, and launched a product a month later. Then, they spent the next three months building 300 sales and support agents. This experience led to a key insight. “We learned that agents don't change that much as you move across verticals, just like humans don't change that much as you move across jobs,” O’Cathain says. “Context changes, but the core framework stays pretty much the same.”

Armed with this idea, the Lua team transitioned the agent framework into a developer tool. Customers can integrate Lua agents into their core workflows and build their own bespoke agents on top of the Lua platform. Teams own their agents and outcomes, compounding efficiency over time. From the beginning, the pricing model has followed usage rather than outcomes. “We want our clients to own their own outcomes, not rent them,” O’Cathain says.

Since launching the agent developer platform in October 2025, Lua has grown revenue close to 30% week-on-week, reaching $1M ARR in its first three months. The company’s platform is live in 20 markets across the world. In February 2026 alone, more agents were built on Lua than in the entire cumulative period since launch.

Agents in One Click

Lua caters to mid-market enterprises with varying engineering ability. The company offers a full-stack agent platform with one-click deployment, accessible via CLI or a natural language interface. Technical and non-technical teams work on the same agents, on the same platform. In hours, a team can have a fully functioning agent workforce, coordinating handoffs between agents and humans, running inside their existing systems. In one example, a loan application company used Lua to build a custom agent and embedded it into the workflow in a matter of days, improving conversation and customer satisfaction. 

Developers at a tech-first enterprise that’s trying to evolve into an agent-first organization can download Lua’s dev docs and the CLI tool, and start building agents. A less-tech savvy company that needs assistance with process imagination and implementation can talk through pain points with the Lua team, understand what it needs, then get a referral to Lua implementation partners for hands-on assistance.

At any level of support, Lua has the answer. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BopUplmvTmo

You Get an Agent, and You Get an Agent…

Lua will use the funding to build out its developer community and the Lua Implementation Network, a growing community of independent partners deploying Lua agent workforces in their own markets around the world. Lua’s combination of product accessibility, founder

relationships, and market presence gives it a real opportunity to become the de facto platform for agent workflows in emerging markets. In developed markets, Lua is primed to see success  helping mid-market companies that find enterprise solutions too heavy and pure open-source frameworks are too technical.

Lorcan, Stefan, and the Lua team are building toward a future where every mid-market company needs an agent layer in the same way they previously needed cloud infrastructure. We wholeheartedly believe in this worldview and recognize the enormous value of a platform that scales globally. That’s why Lua is winning customers in a wide range of industries from around the world. We are proud to support Lua as the company works to realize this vital ambition.