CodeWords raises $9m to automate work before staff ask for it

On 7 May, CodeWords, a London-based company that builds AI agents for business automation, announced a $9m (£6.6m) seed round led by Visionaries. Sequel and Illusian, a family office, joined firstminute capital, which backed the company at pre-seed. The angels include Miro chief executive Andrey Khusid, ElevenLabs chief executive Mati Staniszewski and Supercell chief executive Ilkka Paananen. The company said the money will expand its engineering and go-to-market teams.

The round pays for Cody, an agent that, the company says, learns a business’s tools, patterns and goals and then builds and runs automations for it. The automations run on CodeWords’ own infrastructure, so the customer has nothing to deploy, set up or maintain. Alongside the funding the company shipped three features: contextual memory, which it says lets Cody act on past activity before it is prompted; WhatsApp agents that send updates, request approvals and complete tasks; and Cody Modes, which change how the agent plans and executes depending on the task.

The idea came from a complaint about other automation tools. Automation software promises to save time, the company’s announcement says, but still leaves users to map the logic, set the triggers and maintain the workflows – to think like engineers. “The best operators don’t wait to be asked,” co-founder Aymeric Zhuo said in the announcement. “We built Cody on the same principle.”

CodeWords is betting that a business with no technical staff will automate more of its work if an agent decides what to automate than if staff draw each workflow themselves. The seed round gives it the money to test that. What it has published so far includes its own usage count, three unnamed customer examples in the announcement and a case study on its blog about Piabo Communications, a tech PR agency.

A research lab that found a product

Zhuo and Osman Ramadan incorporated the company as Agemo AI Ltd in February 2023, according to Companies House, where both are directors and each is listed as holding between 25% and 50% of the shares. As Tech.eu reported, Agemo started as an AI research lab focused on neurosymbolic reasoning before the founders turned to a product for everyday business users. In an essay on the company blog, Zhuo argued that scaling transformer models alone would not produce systems that reason about software. He described Dunia, “a neurosymbolic system for software reasoning” that combined neural networks with symbolic methods and could turn high-level descriptions of requirements into working backend systems. That research phase was backed by Fly Ventures and firstminute capital, with angels including Datadog chief executive Olivier Pomel and SwiftKey founder Jon Reynolds.

Zhuo studied at École Polytechnique and worked as a data scientist on Candy Crush and as a product manager at TikTok. Ramadan went to Cambridge and then into a research career at Microsoft. The pair met at an AI startup in London, according to the company. Its about page in January described Zhuo as leading Agemo and Ramadan as leading the vision for CodeWords.

Agencies in the early examples

The company says Cody handles 120,000 tasks a month. Its announcement gives three uses. A finance team described a deal flow monitoring process, and Cody automated it by connecting Dropbox to Monday.com and routing documents to DocuSign for signature. A content agency pointed Cody at LinkedIn and Reddit; it now gathers content, drafts posts, sends them over WhatsApp for approval and publishes them. Another agency built a set of agents to run lead generation for its whole client base.

Two of the three are agencies. CodeWords’ pricing page in April listed a free plan with $2 a day in credits, a Pro plan at $20 a month for solo builders and a Business plan at $100 (£74) a month for power users, which added priority support, business templates and “Cody for Business (white labeling)”. Credits are usage-based and tied to token consumption. The same page described the $100 plan as “perfect for power users who are building mini-products and solutions on CodeWords for others”.

An agent that moves first

Ramadan framed the product around what the agent already knows rather than what it is told. “We want users to feel like they’re working with an agent that already knows their business,” he said. Contextual memory is the feature that carries that promise. The WhatsApp approval step in the content agency’s setup shows where a person still sits: the agent drafts, and a human signs off before anything is published.

CodeWords’ announcement names leaders from n8n and Zapier among its angels, and Zapier co-founder Mike Knoop was listed among its angel investors and advisors on its about page in January. The same page listed the Zapier fund among the company’s backers.

The $9m buys bigger engineering and go-to-market teams for a product that Tech.eu reported is in beta. Five chief executives put money in alongside Visionaries on the company’s pitch that an agent which acts unprompted lets teams without technical staff work like teams that have them. The evidence that the agent works still comes from CodeWords itself, including a monthly task count, unnamed customer examples and a case study it wrote.