Is your next customer an agent powered by artificial intelligence (AI)? San Francisco-based start-up Lightsage says that is very likely. The firm’s founders, who are today announcing a $4 million funding round, have therefore designed a platform to help businesses sell to those agents.

“Our goal is to help any business selling online today to secure more revenue from AI agent customers,” says Jun Liang Lee, CEO and co-founder of Lightsage. “It’s a huge opportunity given the growing sprawl of AI agents helping end users to discover and buy products – to sell to those agents, businesses have to market their products in very different ways."

Data on the advance of AI agents into procurement back up Lee’s point. The market research group Forrester predicts that in 2026, 20% of businesses selling products to other businesses will face quote negotiations that are led entirely by AI agents. At Gartner , researchers say that by 2028, 90% of business-to-business buying will be AI agent-intermediated; that would see $15 trillion of business conducted through agent exchanges.

This is a world in which businesses’ customers are no longer humans who might search for their products and services online or attend a sales presentation. Instead, those customers will increasingly be AI agents programmed to find suitable products for their human owners and then to buy them on their behalf.

Lightsage argues that many businesses are completely unprepared for this new world – they’re still behaving in ways calculated to appeal to the human customers of the past rather than the AI agents doing the buying today. “That’s were we come in,” explains Wen Han Er, CTO and Lee’s co-founder at Lightsage. “Our job is to help businesses ensure they are agent-ready”.

In practice, that means hard work in three areas. First, Lightsage tries to improve a business’s discoverability to AI agents – it’s the modern equivalent of search engine optimisation, with businesses’ online presence optimized to secure agent views and recommendations. The next challenge is to improve usability, with Lightsage looking at how companies can fine-tune their products and services to make them easier for AI agents to utilize. Finally, Lightsage considers payments infrastructure – so that when a businesses clinch a deal with an AI agent, their new customer can actually pay for the transaction in a way that is practical for all.

In the first instance, Lightsage is thinking about businesses selling software products though Lee and Er do not see why the AI agent-as customer principle should not spread throughout commerce. “We are moving from an internet where AI tells people which software to use to one where AI increasingly uses the software itself,” Lee explains. “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.”

Lightsage, launched earlier this year, has already begun selling the platform, with early customers including other San Francisco-based businesses such as Firecrawl, Reducto, Daytona, Rime and Tinyfish. Some of these customers have seen a 10%-20% uptake in sales to AI agent customers after adopting Lightsage’s solutions, Lee claims.

Investors are also showing an interest. Today’s $4 million round is led by Nexus Venture Partners, but also includes backing from senior leaders and business angels from across the developer and AI ecosystem. These include executives past and present from firms including Salesforce, Docusign, Postman and Gitlab.

Abhishek Sharma, a partner at Nexus, argues that the sales imperative has already shifted for many companies. “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,” he says. “AI is now shifting that agency from humans to agents, which can discover, evaluate and act on a customer’s behalf.”