Lunos Inc., a financial technology startup building artificial intelligence agents for accounts receivable, launched to the public today with announced $5 million in funding to enhance its AI agents with reconciliation, payment orchestration and end-to-end cash flow optimization features.

Founded in 2024, Lunos AI is aiming to take on what it claims is one of the most entrenched inefficiencies in the modern economy: the way businesses get paid. The issue the company is taking on is that while consumers pay upfront for goods, business-to-business trade is settled after goods and services are provided. Lunos AI argues that despite decades of advances in software and payments, this system still runs on the manual labor of millions of people in finance teams around the world and involves an endless stream of emails and PDFs.

“This isn’t a payments problem; it’s a communication and negotiation problem,” said founder and Chief Executive Duncan Barrigan. “Finance teams still spend countless hours chasing people over email, answering questions, updating spreadsheets, finding new contacts and reconciling payments with incomplete information. This human approach is required because every customer and invoice is different, but it isn’t scalable and it can’t be optimized the way a consumer checkout flow can.”

Lunos AI’s platform replicates the traditional approach to accounts receivable with an AI worker that finance teams can interact with via Slack and email, as well as through its web application. The AI worker connects to data sources such as QuickBooks and NetSuite, analyzes every customer interaction to decide how best to proceed, and handles two-way conversations with customers about their balances and invoices.

The company’s vision is to provide AI workers that power agent-to-agent B2B commerce, creating a network of AI agents that communicate among each other on behalf of businesses to ensure faster and more efficient payments. The trained AI agents handle cash flow and ensure businesses get paid faster.”

The pre-seed round was co-led by General Catalyst Group Management and Cherry Ventures Management GmbH, with participation from angel investors including current and former chief financial officers and executives from companies such as Eli Lilly and Co., Trustly Group AB, Deliveroo plce, Typeform S.L. and GoCardless Ltd.

“When I worked in finance, I could only dream of a coworker that automated receivables, chased invoices and managed the admin,” said Dinika Mahtani, a partner at Cherry Ventures. “With Lunos, that’s now a reality.”

Image: Lunos