San Francisco, CA, Sept. 08, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The next software customer might never visit a homepage or sit through a product demo. Coding agents like Claude Code, Codex and Cursor can already discover products, choose libraries, install SDKs and call APIs on a user’s behalf. Increasingly, software has to win over machines that can go from finding a product to using it.
Lightsage was built for that paradigm shift. Today, the San Francisco startup announced $4 million in funding led by Nexus Venture Partners, to build the infrastructure for what it calls Agent-Led Growth, or ALG. The round also includes backing from operators across the developer and AI ecosystem, including 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.
Lightsage founders Sean (Wen Han) Er and Jun Liang Lee.
From product-led growth to agent-led growth
Software companies have spent decades learning how to convert humans. AI agents are creating a new buyer. A coding agent can now choose a database, API or authentication provider, then start integrating it without ever visiting a vendor’s website. That means visibility alone is no longer enough. The agent still has to understand the docs, choose the right SDK, authenticate and get the product working.
This is where existing GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) products fall short, and where LightSage closes the loop: ensuring agents can actually use and pay for the product.
“We are moving from an internet where AI tells people which software to use to one where AI increasingly uses the software itself,” said Jun Liang Lee, CEO and Co-Founder of Lightsage. “That changes what growth means. Visibility still matters, but the real test is whether an agent can understand your product and get to a successful outcome. We think every software company will eventually need to optimize for that journey to unlock Agent-Led Growth”
How Lightsage works
Lightsage gives software companies a way to see their product through an agent’s eyes. The platform runs large-scale simulations across answer engines and coding agents, measuring where a company appears against competitors and what happens next. Agents are given real tasks that require them to navigate documentation, choose the right tooling and successfully use APIs, SDKs, CLIs, MCP servers and Agent Skills.
When they fail, Lightsage pinpoints why. The break might be discoverability, confusing documentation, authentication, an API endpoint, an SDK implementation or an incompatible MCP server. Teams can fix the issue, rerun the workflow and measure whether agent success improves.
Lightsage also provides analytics on real agent traffic: when agents visit a company’s website or docs, what they interact with and whether those journeys turn into product usage. The longer-term goal is to close the loop entirely, feeding those insights back into development and deployment workflows so products continuously improve for agents.
The platform currenty supports Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode and a growing range of other coding agents.
Early traction
Lightsage is starting with developer software, where agent behavior is already easy to observe. Customers including Firecrawl, Reducto, Daytona, Rime and Tinyfish use Lightsage to understand why agents choose certain products, where integrations break and how key workflows perform after product or documentation changes.
A typical use case starts with a coding agent repeatedly recommending a competitor. Lightsage reproduces the same task across products and agents to isolate the cause: visibility, documentation or the product experience itself.
A new growth discipline for software
Agent-Led Growth creates questions traditional analytics cannot answer. Human acquisition can be traced through searches, clicks and sign-ups. Agents may discover, evaluate and use a product without following any of those paths, making their traffic and revenue much harder to attribute.
Their behavior is also less predictable. Different coding agents can approach the same product in different ways, and those patterns shift as models and interfaces change. A workflow that works in one agent may fail in another.
Lightsage believes Agent Experience — how easily AI agents can understand, use and pay for a product — will become a core part of Agent-Led Growth, much as Developer Experience became critical to winning human developers.
“The internet brought the economy online, with humans discovering, choosing and transacting through digital channels. That created an enormous marketing technology industry focused on understanding and optimizing the human journey,” said Abhishek Sharma, partner at Nexus. “AI is now shifting that agency from humans to agents, which can discover, evaluate and act on a customer’s behalf. Lightsage is building the intelligence infrastructure for this new era of autonomous browsing, helping companies optimize for agent conversion, not just awareness.”
What’s next
Lightsage will use this funding to deepen its agent evaluation, analytics, attribution and optimization capabilities across APIs, SDKs, CLIs, MCP servers and agent skills. Developer tools are just the starting point: as agents begin acting directly across B2B software, infrastructure and payments, Lightsage wants to become the infrastructure companies use to understand, improve and ultimately win the agent channel. To build it, Lightsage is growing its team across technical and commercial roles, and welcomes candidates who want to help define the agent channel at lightsage.com/careers.
Media images can be found here.
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
