Lightsage is developing an Agent-Led Growth platform that helps software companies—across ecommerce, payments, consumer tech, and beyond—understand and optimize how AI agents find, successfully adopt, and ultimately pay for their products.
San Francisco, CA — September 8, 2026. The next customer for software companies may never browse a homepage or watch a sales demo. Tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor are already capable of finding products, selecting libraries, installing SDKs, and calling APIs autonomously on behalf of users. As a result, software increasingly needs to appeal not just to people, but to machines capable of moving seamlessly from discovery to implementation.
Lightsage was founded to address this shift. The San Francisco-based company announced today that it has raised $4 million in a funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners to build out infrastructure for what it terms "Agent-Led Growth" (ALG). Additional investors include former Salesforce CTO Steven Tamm, Postman CEO Abhinav Asthana, Apollo CEO Matt Curl, DocuSign President and GM of Growth Robert Chatwani, former GitLab Head of Growth Hila, Resend CEO Zeno, Firecrawl Co-founder Eric, Daytona CEO Ivan, Tinyfish COO Shuhao, and Adam Frankl, among others.
Beyond Product-Led Growth: The Rise of Agent-Led Growth
For decades, software companies have refined strategies for converting human users. Now, AI agents represent an entirely new type of buyer. A coding agent can independently select a database, API, or authentication service and begin integration—without ever landing on a company's website. Simply being visible to these agents isn't sufficient; they also need to be able to interpret documentation, pick the correct SDK, handle authentication, and get the product functioning correctly.
This is precisely the gap that traditional GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) tools fail to address, and where Lightsage aims to provide a complete solution—ensuring not just that agents can find a product, but that they can actually use and transact with it.
"We're witnessing a shift from an internet where AI recommends software to humans, to one where AI directly operates the software itself," explained Jun Liang Lee, Lightsage's CEO and Co-Founder. "This redefines what growth means. Being seen still matters, but the real measure of success is whether an agent can comprehend your product and reach a successful outcome. We believe every software company will eventually need to optimize for this journey to fully capture Agent-Led Growth."
The Lightsage Approach
Lightsage enables software companies to evaluate their products from an AI agent's perspective. The platform conducts extensive simulations across answer engines and coding agents, tracking how a company ranks against competitors and what unfolds afterward. Agents are assigned realistic tasks requiring them to work through documentation, select appropriate tools, and successfully navigate APIs, SDKs, CLIs, MCP servers, and Agent Skills.
When an agent encounters failure, Lightsage identifies the root cause—whether it's poor discoverability, unclear documentation, authentication issues, problematic API endpoints, flawed SDK implementation, or MCP server incompatibilities. Companies can then address the issue, retest the workflow, and track improvements in agent success rates.
The platform also delivers analytics on genuine agent activity: tracking when agents access a company's site or documentation, what they engage with, and whether those interactions lead to actual product adoption. Lightsage's broader vision involves creating a continuous feedback loop, channeling these insights directly into development and deployment processes so products keep improving for agent use over time.
Currently, the platform supports Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, and an expanding list of coding agents.
Building Momentum
Lightsage's initial focus is developer-facing software, where agent behavior is most readily observable. Companies including Firecrawl, Reducto, Daytona, Rime, and Tinyfish already rely on Lightsage to figure out why agents favor certain products, pinpoint where integrations fail, and monitor how critical workflows perform following updates to products or documentation.
A common scenario begins when a coding agent consistently steers toward a competing product. Lightsage recreates the identical task across multiple products and agents to determine whether the issue stems from visibility, documentation quality, or the underlying product experience.
Establishing a New Growth Category
Agent-Led Growth introduces challenges that conventional analytics tools simply weren't built to handle. Human customer journeys can be mapped through search queries, clicks, and sign-ups. Agents, however, may discover, assess, and adopt a product through entirely different means—making it far more difficult to trace their activity and attribute resulting revenue.
Agent behavior is also inherently unpredictable. Different coding agents may approach identical products in distinct ways, and these patterns continue evolving alongside changes in underlying models and interfaces. A workflow that functions smoothly with one agent might break down entirely with another.
Lightsage anticipates that "Agent Experience"—the ease with which AI agents can understand, operate, and transact with a product—will become as fundamental to Agent-Led Growth as Developer Experience became to attracting human developers.
"The internet transformed commerce by enabling humans to discover, select, and transact through digital channels, giving rise to a massive marketing technology sector focused on optimizing that human journey," said Abhishek Sharma, partner at Nexus. "Now AI is transferring that agency from humans to agents, which can independently discover, evaluate, and act on a customer's behalf. Lightsage is building the intelligence layer for this emerging era of autonomous browsing, helping companies focus on agent conversion rather than just visibility."
Looking Ahead
Lightsage plans to use the new funding to expand its capabilities in agent evaluation, analytics, attribution, and optimization spanning APIs, SDKs, CLIs, MCP servers, and agent skills. While developer tools mark the starting point, Lightsage envisions a future where agents operate directly across B2B software, infrastructure, and payment systems—and aims to become the essential infrastructure companies rely on to understand, refine, and ultimately succeed in the agent channel. The company is actively expanding its team across both technical and commercial functions, with open roles available at lightsage.com/careers for those interested in helping shape this emerging space.
About Lightsage
Founded by CEO Jun Liang Lee and CTO Sean Er, Lightsage is an Agent-Led Growth platform for all software companies. It helps all software companies, developer tools and B2B software companies understand how AI agents discover, evaluate and use their products.
The platform covers three core areas: Agent Discovery across coding agents and answer engines, Agent Experience evaluations across APIs, SDKs, CLIs, MCP servers and agent skills, and Agent Analytics that show where agents visit and where they fail.
About Nexus Venture Partners
Nexus is an early-stage VC firm with $3.2B in capital under mgmt., partnering with the most ambitious founders building product-first companies. Nexus portfolio includes Apollo.io, Firecrawl, Gumloop, Fingerprint, TensorWave, Avoca, Postman, Zepto, MinIO, Neysa, Daloopa, Freehand.ai, Orkes, PubMatic, Delhivery, Ultrahuman, Rapido, and more. For more information, visit www.nexusvp.com
