Melbourne-born startup Lucent, founded by 22-year-old Alisa Wu, has raised $2 million in a pre-Seed funding round. The investors include Long Journey Ventures, Horizon, Browder Capital, and Weekend Fund, and the round closed within 36 hours.
Wu doesn’t have a product yet and is currently a solo founder with no team.
Her previous startup, Stella AI, was acquired in 2024, and she was also a founding engineer at MagicBrief, an AI advertising 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 labels data and trains AI models, was valued at $29 billion when Meta bought a 49% stake and hired its CEO.
But Victorian Government shouldn’t get too excited—Alisa Wu doesn’t plan to keep her new company, Lucent, 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.
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