'No pitch decks. No investor calls': AI agent Sam raises $8 million for Lyzr AI; Check how

In a first-of-its-kind move that hints at how AI could transform fundraising, Lyzr AI has raised $8 million in Series A funding, with much of the groundwork handled not by humans but by its own AI agent, Agent Sam.

The funding round was led by Rocketship.VC, with participation from Accenture, Firstsource, Plug and Play Tech Center, GFT Ventures, BGV, and PFNYC. As part of the development, Henry Ford III, a director at Ford Motor Company, will join Lyzr’s board.

The startup said the fresh capital will help it tackle one of enterprise AI’s toughest challenges, secure and governed deployment of autonomous agents in production.

How agent Sam changed the groundwork

Lyzr’s own technology took center stage during its fundraising process. The startup's AI agent, Agent Sam, managed investor Q&A sessions and automated the early stages of outreach.

“Agent Sam could answer repetitive questions about the business, projections, team, and differentiators. It reduced the typical one-month fundraising cycle to just two weeks,” said co-founder Anirudh Narayan.

While the final commitments were closed through traditional channels, Narayan called the experiment “a great marketing channel and a way to get a foot in the door.”

He added, “You can build the best campaign, but if you don’t have a solid business, it’ll fall short. The agent helped start conversations, it didn’t close them.”

'Third Way' for enterprise AI

Founded in 2023 by Siva Surendira and Anirudh Narayan, Lyzr positions itself as the “Third Way” for enterprise AI, a middle path between open-source frameworks like LangGraph and closed ecosystems such as Salesforce’s Agentforce.

“The AI revolution will be won by enterprises that can safely move from promising prototypes to a governed, autonomous workforce at scale,” said Surendira, the company’s founder and CEO.

“This funding, combined with Henry’s unparalleled experience in industrial-scale operations, validates our mission. We are building the essential infrastructure, the central nervous system that allows organisations to deploy AI agents with confidence, full IP ownership, and zero vendor lock-in.”

Lyzr’s system allows enterprises to build and deploy AI agents securely within their own cloud or on-premise setups, ensuring complete data privacy and ownership.

To reduce risk in AI deployment, especially in regulated sectors, Lyzr has built an agent simulation engine inspired by AI pioneer Yann LeCun’s Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA). The system lets enterprises run over 10,000 simulations per agent, stress-testing their performance before real-world rollout.

The startup believes that this approach helps ensure agents are reliable, compliant, and capable of handling complex workflows across departments, from HR and finance to marketing and customer service.

Beyond automating tasks, Lyzr is pursuing what it calls Organisational General Intelligence (OGI), a networked model where multiple AI agents collaborate across departments to create a self-improving, interconnected enterprise system. 

“The era of siloed AI copilots is over. The future belongs to an interconnected AI workforce that forms an organisation’s central intelligence,” said Surendira.

“By uniting agents on our AgentMesh platform, we create a network effect where the entire organisation becomes more efficient and intelligent with each new agent deployed.”

The startup said that it currently employs around 80 people and reports $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue, with plans to reach $7 million by February 2026. To aid that growth, it will soon introduce an agentic coding interface, a tool that lets developers create complex agent workflows using a single prompt.