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.

"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.

"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."