Lua has raised $5.8 million in funding led by Norrsken22. The round also saw participation from Flourish Ventures, 20VC, P1 Ventures, Phosphor Capital and Y Combinator, alongside a group of angel investors.
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Lua is positioning itself as an “operating system” for agent-based work. It allows companies to build, deploy, and manage AI-powered agents that work alongside human teams.
The company was founded by Lorcan O’Cathain and Stefan Kruger, who previously worked together scaling a fintech business in East Africa. O’Cathain later served as Managing Director of Zephyr Management’s Africa business, while Kruger held a senior engineering role at Paystack prior to its acquisition by Stripe.
The platform is designed to lower the barrier for companies looking to adopt AI agents. Teams can build and deploy “agent workforces” without needing deep technical expertise, using either developer tools or a visual interface.
Lua handles the underlying infrastructure. These include model orchestration, integrations and monitoring. This allows businesses to focus on defining their workflows and logic and not in managing complex AI systems.
According to CEO 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. Most agent platforms compound this with black box tooling and per-outcome pricing: the more your agents succeed, the more you pay, with no pathway to improving your agent economics. Lua is built on the opposite principle: teams own their agents, own their outcomes, and build compounding efficiency over time.”
Lead investor Lexi Novitske said, “We are thrilled to support Lua. The founders fundamentally understand how agent and human workforces need to collaborate to get work done. Additionally, they are a global company that has deployed in Africa, Asia, the U.S. and Europe with deep experience, a volume of data, and a pricing intuition that’s difficult to replicate. We’re excited to help them build out this operating system for human and agent workforces.”
With the new funding, Lua plans to expand its developer ecosystem and grow the Lua Implementation Network.
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