The company said it will use the new funding to continue to build out its developer community and the ‘Lua Implementation Network’.

Irish co-founded and London-based agentic workforce AI start-up Lua raised $5.8m in funding last week (16 April) in a round led by Norrsken22.

The start-up has built an AI agent developer platform that it says enables customers the opportunity to build their own AI agents through collaboration, regardless of a team or organisation’s technical depth or skill.

The company said it will use the new funding to continue to build out its developer community and the ‘Lua Implementation Network’, which it said is a growing community of independent partners deploying Lua agentic workforces in their own markets around the world.

Other investors included Flourish Ventures, 20VC, P1 Ventures, Phosphor Capital and Y Combinator, along with angels such as Henri Stern, the CEO of Privy; Kaz Nejatian, the CEO of Opendoor; and Med Benmansour, the CEO of Nuitee.

“The companies that will win over the next few years are the ones that build their agent workforce with the same intentionality they bring to their human workforce,” said CEO and co-founder Lorcan O’Cathain.

“Most businesses are either blocked by technical complexity or locked into rigid tools that don’t reflect how their teams actually work.

“Lua is built on the opposite principle: teams own their agents, own their outcomes and build compounding efficiency over time.”

The platform is described as offering “an opinionated, full-stack agent platform” that is suitable for both technical and non-technical users, to run inside existing systems while “coordinating handoffs between agents and humans”.

In a LinkedIn post regarding the funding announcement, Lua said the number of agents on its platform had grown by 10 times during Q1.

Lua was founded in 2024 by O’Cathain and Stefan Kruger, who is the company’s CTO. The company said it “has been global since day one, deployed across emerging markets in Africa and Asia alongside customers in the US and Europe”.

The founders of Lua “fundamentally understand how agent and human workforces need to collaborate to get work done”, said Lexi Novitske, a general partner at Norrsken22.

Lua proposes solutions for customers in healthcare, financial services, retail, manufacturing and real estate. The integration of AI into the workforce and workplace is currently a topical issue for a variety of reasons.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.