Seed round led by Norrsken22, with participation from Flourish Ventures, Twenty Two Ventures, Phosphor Capital and Y Combinator

LONDON, April 16, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Lua, the operating system for human agent collaboration in the workspace, announced today it has secured $5.8M in funding led by Norrsken22. Additional investors include Flourish Ventures, 20VC, P1 Ventures, Phosphor Capital and Y Combinator along with notable angels Henri Stern (CEO Privy), Kaz Nejatian (CEO of OpenTable) and Med Benmansour (CEO of Nuitee).

Lua enables any team, regardless of technical depth, to build, own, and manage their own agent workforce from day one. The company is founded by Lorcan O'Cathain and Stefan Kruger, who met while scaling a fintech business in East Africa - Lorcan as COO, Stefan as CTO. Before Lua, Lorcan was MD of Zephyr Management's Africa business, a leading VC/PE fund operating across Africa, India and Sri Lanka. Stefan was VP of Engineering at Paystack, joining before the Stripe acquisition.

Lua will use the funding to continue to build out its developer community and the Lua Implementation Network, a growing community of independent partners deploying Lua agent workforces in their own markets around the world.

Since launching its agent developer platform in October 2025, Lua has grown revenue close to 30% week-on-week. In February 2026 alone, more agents were built on Lua than in the entire cumulative period since launch.

Where teams collaborate with agent workforce

Lua is an opinionated, full-stack agent platform with one-click deployment, accessible via CLI or a natural language interface. The company handles infrastructure, model orchestration, data, channel integrations, and monitoring so that businesses only have to write business logic and choose the integrations their agents need. Technical builders get a powerful framework and full developer tooling. Non-technical teams get a visual interface that puts the same capability in their hands. Both work on the same agents, on the same platform. In hours, a team can have a fully functioning agent workforce, coordinating handoffs between agents and humans, running inside their existing systems.

“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 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.”

“We are thrilled to support Lua. The founders fundamentally understand how agent and human workforces need to collaborate to get work done,” said Lexi Novitske, General Partner at Norrsken22. “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.”

About Lua

Lua is one of the first companies to build an operating system for human and agent collaboration where any team, regardless of technical depth, can build, own and manage their own agent workforce. Lua has been global since day one, deployed across emerging markets in Africa and Asia alongside customers in the US and Europe. It is also rapidly growing its Lua Implementation Network, a growing community of independent partners deploying Lua agent workforces in their own markets. Lua is backed by Norrsken22, Flourish Ventures, Twenty Two Ventures, Phosphor Capital and Y Combinator along with notable angels Henri Stern, Kaz Nejatian (CEO of OpenTable) and Med Benmansour (CEO of Nuitee). To learn more visit https://heylua.ai.

About Norrsken22

Norrsken22 is a tech growth equity fund partnering with ambitious entrepreneurs to scale disruptive businesses across Africa. The firm was founded on the belief that scalable entrepreneurship drives long-term and sustainable economic growth. The fund is managed by a pan-African investment team with previous experience backing Africa’s fastest growing tech unicorns. It is backed by 33 unicorn founders, contributing entrepreneurial skills and funding, and supported by an advisory council of business leaders from across the continent.

Contact:
Kerry Metzdorf
kerry@big-swing.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/932a6bf8-7dac-4dec-bca8-b3448d40c201

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