- Joined
- Sep 22, 2008
- Messages
- 86,836
- Points
- 113
Lucent, founded by 22-year-old Alisa Wu, raises $2 million in pre-seed
Startup Daily- October 10, 20252 MIN READ
Lucent founder and CEO Alisa Wu. Supplied
Melbourne-born startup Lucent, founded by 22-year-old Alisa Wu, has raised $2 million in a pre-Seed round.
Backers include Long Journey Ventures, Horizon, Browder Capital, and Weekend Fund. The round closed out within 36 hours of launch.Wu doesn’t yet have a product and she’s a solo founder with no team.
Her first startup, Stella AI, was acquired in 2024. Wu was also a founding engineer at MagicBrief, an AI ad platform later bought by Canva.
She said the new biz was about providing data upstream, for frontier labs that “need unique datasets for specific use cases”.
“Lucent provides data that allows them to build differentiated capabilities. We provide behavioural datasets grounded in real web interactions.”
Scale AI, a company that provides data labelling and AI training services for machine learning models, was valued at US$29 billion when Meta bought a 49% stake and poached the CEO.
But don’t get too excited, Victorian Government, Wu isn’t planning to keep her new company in Melbourne for long.
“Over the next 12 months, we’ll be relocating to San Francisco to focus on expanding our unique dataset and deepening partnerships with frontier labs,” she said.
Vedika Jain, a general partner at Weekend Fund, said Lucent was going to be well-placed to tackle a major bottleneck in AI development, “training data for browser agents”.
“We backed Alisa because she combines the vision to see a category-defining opportunity with the execution to build it,” she said.
“In a short time, Alisa has galvanised excitement from frontier labs and assembled an impressive group of backers.
“Lucent is positioned to become a foundational player in the future of browser agents.”
Sandy Kory, a general partner with Horizon, agreed that this raise was all about belief in Alisa Wu.
“We invested in Lucent because of Alisa,” Kory said.
“She has a unique mix of founder experience, deep technical ability, and sharp insight into where AI is headed.”
Lucent said its pre-seed funds will be used to build product and land pilot customers, while deepening its dataset and partnerships with advanced AI labs.
But don’t get too excited, Victorian Government, Wu isn’t planning to keep her new company in Melbourne for long.
“Over the next 12 months, we’ll be relocating to San Francisco to focus on expanding our unique dataset and deepening partnerships with frontier labs,” she said.
Vedika Jain, a general partner at Weekend Fund, said Lucent was going to be well-placed to tackle a major bottleneck in AI development, “training data for browser agents”.
“We backed Alisa because she combines the vision to see a category-defining opportunity with the execution to build it,” she said.
“In a short time, Alisa has galvanised excitement from frontier labs and assembled an impressive group of backers.
“Lucent is positioned to become a foundational player in the future of browser agents.”
Sandy Kory, a general partner with Horizon, agreed that this raise was all about belief in Alisa Wu.
“We invested in Lucent because of Alisa,” Kory said.
“She has a unique mix of founder experience, deep technical ability, and sharp insight into where AI is headed.”
Lucent said its pre-seed funds will be used to build product and land pilot customers, while deepening its dataset and partnerships with advanced AI labs.
