Grace Ashiru
A startup founded by two operators with deep roots in East Africa’s fintech ecosystem has closed a seed round that backs its bet on an emerging question every organisation is now wrestling with: how do you actually run a workforce that mixes people and AI agents?
Lua has raised $5.8 million in a seed round led by Norrsken22, with participation from Flourish Ventures, 20VC, P1 Ventures, Phosphor Capital, and Y Combinator, alongside angel investors including Privy CEO Henri Stern, Opendoor CEO Kaz Nejatian, and Nuitee CEO Med Benmansour. y was founded by Lorcan O’Cathain and Stefan Kruger, who met while scaling a fintech business in East Africa. O’Cathain previously served as COO at Kenyan-based 4G Capital and is a co-founder of Money254. Kruger was VP of Engineering at Paystack before its acquisition by Stripe.
What Lua is building is a full-stack agent platform — one that handles infrastructure, model orchestration, data pipelines, channel integrations, and monitoring. Businesses only have to supply the business logic and choose which integrations their agents need. The platform is accessible through a command-line interface for developers who want granular control, and through a natural language interface for non-technical teams — with both types of users working on the same agents in the same environment. The company says a team can have a functioning agent workforce up and running within hours. Wiflix
Lua launched its platform in October 2025 and says revenue has been growing at nearly 30 per cent week-on-week since then. In February 2026, more agents were built on Lua than in all previous months combined — a signal of how quickly companies are moving from testing AI tools to deploying them inside workflows. Early customers include African startups such as Turaco, Tushop, Umba, and Numida, which are using the platform to automate internal processes and coordinate tasks between human teams and AI systems.
The platform is now operational in 20 global markets, serving sectors including hospitality and financial services, and the company has reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue within its first three months of launch.
Norrsken22 General Partner Lexi Novitske said the fund sees Lua as addressing a practical problem in how companies organise work between people and AI systems, pointing to the founders’ operational background across multiple regions and the depth of real-world usage data that comes with having deployed in Africa, Asia, the US, and Europe — a combination she described as giving the company a pricing intuition that is difficult to replicate.
The funding will be used to expand Lua’s developer community and grow its Lua Implementation Network — a global partner ecosystem focused on deploying agent-based systems across different markets.
