Lua Global Inc. today announced it raised $5.8 million in early-stage funding to build a platform that allows any team, irrespective of its technical depth, to build, deploy and manage an agentic artificial intelligence workforce. 

Norrsken22 led the seed round. Flourish Ventures, 20VC, P1 Ventures, Phosphor Capital and Y Combinator also participated, alongside some angel investors: Privy Chief Executive Henri Stern, Opendoor Inc. CEO Kaz Nejatian and Nuiee Travel Ltd. CEO Med Benmansour. 

In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Lua founder and CEO Lorcan O’Cathain (pictured, right) and founder and Chief Technology Officer Stefan Kruger (left) said that the company is trying to shift the AI paradigm from “workflow automation” to “org chart.” 

“The org of the future is a 10-person human team with 30 agents,” O’Cathain said. To some, it’s not a quip; it’s a revelation.  

Both Forrester Research Inc. and Gartner Inc. see 2026 as the year that agentic AI starts doing the real work with adoption soaring. However, more than 40% of agentic initiatives adopted this year will probably fail because organizations don’t implement them with governance in mind. 

In the brave new world of AI agents, where AI becomes part of the workforce instead of just at-call chatbots, the metaphor is more or less similar to labor. Equally, they need to be treated with defined roles within the organization, not just background software. They must be managed as part of the team. 

“It was critical to us to give people a platform where they could actually track their agent efficiency and improve it over time,” O’Cathain said. Just like employees, agents work all week long and at the end of the month, that means they have progress reports.  

He noted that importantly, agentic adoption is moving, although it’s not moving quite as fast as people think it is.  

Technical barriers still exist, and the problem persists because most business users know that they want or need AI. They just don’t have the know-how or wherewithal to adopt it safely or securely, and that will ultimately lead to failures. “Very rarely do you see organizations actually effectively using it to manage full workflows,” Kruger said.  

How Lua brings agents to businesses

When it comes to building, Lua decided to split its audience between developers who now exactly what they want and just want to spin up agents and not worry about infrastructure, using real TypeScript to define sessions, and nontechnical business users who know they need an agent workforce but don’t know how where to start. 

For business users, O’Cathain aptly defined the experience as “choose your own adventure.” In practice, the flow seems to be: A customer can build via natural language in the visual builder or start from templates and checkboxes if they want more guidance. Finally, they land inside a command center with “spaces” for different functions such as sales, finance or marketing to manage the live agents.  

With this funding round, Lua said, the company aims to build on its developer community and expand in the United States. 

“We did the opposite for an infrastructure product and rolled out very quickly with large and mid-market customers first,” O’Cathain explained. “Now we’re going back to build out our developer community.” 

He went on to say that many of the company’s hires might in fact be agents. “We think the teams that are going to succeed are the ones that start to think about their agent workforce with the same intentionality as their human workforce,” O’Cathain said. 

Photo: Lua Global