Announces launch and $5m pre-seed round led by General Catalyst and Cherry Ventures
Lunos AI, a fintech startup building AI agents for accounts receivable (AR), announced its public launch along with a $5 million pre-seed funding round led by General Catalyst and Cherry Ventures.
Lunos AI is tackling one of the most entrenched inefficiencies in the modern economy: the way businesses get paid. While most consumers pay upfront with seamless checkouts, roughly $100tn of B2B trade is settled after goods and services are provided. Despite decades of advances in software and payments, this system still runs on the manual labor of millions of people in finance teams around the world. It’s an endless stream of emails and PDFs.
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“This isn’t a payments problem it’s a communication and negotiation problem,” said Duncan Barrigan, Founder and CEO of Lunos AI and former Chief Product Officer of European payments unicorn GoCardless. “Finance teams still spend countless hours chasing people over email, answering questions, updating spreadsheets, finding new contacts, and reconciling payments with incomplete information. This human approach is required because every customer and invoice is different – but it isn’t scalable, and it can’t be optimized the way a consumer checkout flow can.”
Lunos AI replicates the traditional approach to accounts receivable with an AI worker that finance teams can interact with via Slack and email, as well as through its web application. It connects to data sources such as QuickBooks and Netsuite, analyzes every customer interaction to decide how best to proceed, and handles two-way conversations with customers about their balances and invoices.
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“Business payments shouldn’t feel like the Wild West,” Barrigan added. “Our vision is to provide AI workers that power agent-to-agent B2B commerce. This creates a network of AI agents that communicate amongst each other on behalf of businesses to ensure faster and more efficient payments. Cash flow is often the primary reason businesses fail and by having trained AI agents to handle this for them, and ensure they get paid faster, this traditional barrier becomes easier to overcome.”
The pre-seed round was co-led by General Catalyst and Cherry Ventures, with participation from a select group of angel investors including current and former CFOs and executives from companies such as Eli Lilly, Trustly, Deliveroo, Typeform and GoCardless. “When I worked in finance, I could only dream of a coworker that automated receivables, chased invoices, and managed the admin. With Lunos, that’s now a reality,” said Dinika Mahtani, Partner at Cherry Ventures. “We’re excited by Duncan and the team’s ambitious vision to redefine receivables and payments for B2B commerce, leveraging AI in a way that’s both practical and transformative.”
Lunos AI is now available for all businesses and offers white-glove service as well as an easy-to-use self-serve platform. The company will use the funds to expand the team and build out the capabilities of its AI agents, adding reconciliation, payment orchestration, and end-to-end cash flow optimization. Lunos will also develop an agent that accounting, invoicing, and CRM providers can embed directly into their own financial products.
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“From day one, we wanted our worker to be accessible,” Barrigan said. “Businesses shouldn’t need a six-month integration process just to modernize receivables. With Lunos, you can sign up, start running, and see value right away.”
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Source : prnewswire