Lightsage is building the Agent-Led Growth platform to help software companies across e-commerce, payments, consumer businesses and other sectors understand and improve how AI agents discover, use and eventually pay for their products.
The next software customer might never visit a homepage or sit through a product demo. Coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex and Cursor can already discover products, choose libraries, install SDKs and call APIs on a user’s behalf. Increasingly, software must win over machines that can move from finding a product to using it.
Lightsage was built for that shift. The San Francisco startup has 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 General Manager 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.
From Product-Led Growth to Agent-Led Growth
Software companies have spent decades learning how to convert human users. AI agents are creating a new type of buyer. A coding agent can now choose a database, API or authentication provider and begin integrating it without ever visiting a vendor’s website. Visibility alone is therefore no longer enough. The agent must also understand the documentation, choose the right SDK, authenticate and get the product working.
According to Lightsage, existing generative engine optimization products focus mainly on discovery. Lightsage aims to close the loop by helping companies determine whether agents can successfully use and pay for their products.
“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 products through an agent’s eyes. The platform runs large-scale simulations across answer engines and coding agents, measuring where a company appears relative to competitors and what happens next. Agents receive real tasks that require them to navigate documentation, choose the right tools and successfully use APIs, SDKs, CLIs, MCP servers and agent skills.
When an agent fails, Lightsage identifies the possible cause. The issue might involve discoverability, confusing documentation, authentication, an API endpoint, an SDK implementation or an incompatible MCP server. Teams can address the issue, rerun the workflow and measure whether agent success improves.
Lightsage also provides analytics on agent traffic, including when agents visit a company’s website or documentation, what they interact with and whether those journeys result in product usage. Its longer-term goal is to feed these insights into development and deployment workflows so products can continually improve for agents.
The platform currently supports Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode and a growing range of other coding agents.
Early Traction
Lightsage is initially focusing on developer software, where agent behavior is already easier to observe. The company says customers including Firecrawl, Reducto, Daytona, Rime and Tinyfish use Lightsage to understand why agents choose certain products, where integrations fail and how key workflows perform after product or documentation changes.
A typical use case begins when a coding agent repeatedly recommends a competitor. Lightsage reproduces the same task across products and agents to isolate the cause, whether it is visibility, documentation or the product experience.
A New Growth Discipline for Software
Agent-Led Growth presents questions that 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 those paths, making their traffic and revenue harder to attribute.
Agent behavior can also be less predictable. Different coding agents may approach the same product in different ways, and those patterns can shift as models and interfaces change. A workflow that succeeds in one agent may fail in another.
Lightsage believes Agent Experience, defined as how easily AI agents can understand, use and pay for a product, will become a core component of Agent-Led Growth, much as Developer Experience became important to companies seeking to win 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 Venture Partners. “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.”
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