CodeWords raises $9M to give every business an AI agent
CodeWords announced a $9M seed round led by Visionaries, with participation from firstminute capital (who first backed the company at pre-seed), Sequel, and Illusian, the family office of Europe’s most renowned unicorn founders. They are joined by angel investors and advisors such as Andrey Khusid (CEO of Miro), Mati Staniszewski (CEO of ElevenLabs), Hanno Renner (CEO of Personio), Robert Gentz (CEO of Zalando), Ilkka Paananen (CEO of Supercell), Alexandre Berriche (Founder of Fleet), Kieran Flanangan (CMO at Hubspot) and François Chollet (Co-founder of the ARC Prize), along with leaders at OpenAI, Mistral, n8n, and Zapier. The funding will be used to expand CodeWords’ go-to-market and engineering functions.
Most AI tools wait to be told what to do. CodeWords doesn’t. At the core of the platform is Cody, CodeWords’ AI agent. It learns your business from day one – your tools, your goals, your patterns – and gets to work by suggesting and building automations. Those automations run automatically, doing the work in the background across thousands of integrations and across messaging tools. One finance team described a deal flow monitoring workflow, and Cody automated it within minutes by connecting Dropbox to Monday.com then sending documents for signature over Docusign. A content agency pointed Cody at its social media channels; Cody now finds relevant content, drafts posts, sends them via WhatsApp for approval, and publishes automatically – a task that would previously have required an IT team to build and maintain. Another automation agency built a fleet of agents to deliver lead generation services to its client base. Cody already handles 500,000 of these tasks a month.
Unlike vibe coding tools, CodeWords aims to go beyond prototyping and brittle automations by putting personalised AI to work for non-technical people – every agent runs entirely on CodeWords’ infrastructure, handling deployment, maintenance, and all the setups.
“The best operators don’t wait to be asked. We built Cody on the same principle – an agent that learns about your business, sees what needs doing, and delivers outcomes.” – Aymeric Zhuo, Co-founder, CodeWords
From research lab to CodeWords
CodeWords is the product of a deliberate refocus. The company began life as Agemo, an AI research lab whose neurosymbolic approach to reasoning through code was featured in the ARC-AGI benchmark alongside OpenAI in December 2024. But co-founders Aymeric Zhuo and Osman Ramadan concluded the research, however promising, was a distraction from a more important question: what would it look like to build an agent that actually worked for people who couldn’t afford for it not to? Within months they had pivoted, and CodeWords was in beta.
Alongside the round, CodeWords is launching three new capabilities: contextual memory, which lets Cody learn from past activity and context so it can act before it’s asked; WhatsApp support, so Cody can reach users where they already are; and Cody modes, which adapt how it plans and executes depending on the task at hand.
“We want users to feel like they’re working with an agent that already knows their business. Cody learns continuously – so instead of starting from scratch every time, it’s already thinking about what you need next.” – Osman Ramadan, Co-founder, CodeWords
The founders
Zhuo and Ramadan both come from backgrounds where access to technology wasn’t a given, an experience that shaped how they think about making powerful tools more accessible.
Aymeric grew up in French Guiana, working in the grocery and restaurant his parents, immigrants from rural China who spoke just enough French to get by, had built from nothing. He went on to study Engineering at École Polytechnique and later worked as a data scientist on Candy Crush and as a product manager at TikTok.
Osman grew up in a village outside Khartoum, Sudan, in a household regularly visited by the intelligence services because his father, an academic, was politically outspoken. He learned to program at eleven without a computer, before going on to study at Cambridge and work as a research scientist at Microsoft.
When they met at an AI startup in London, they recognised the same pattern in each other immediately. Both had had to out-work and out-learn their surroundings. Neither had much patience for tools that only worked if you already knew what you were doing. That’s what CodeWords is built to fix.
“Most automation tools promise simplicity but still require technical thinking underneath. CodeWords is one of the first products we’ve seen where that truly disappears – you describe the task, and Cody runs it. What impressed us just as much is the team’s speed and conviction: Aymeric and Osman moved from research to a working product in a matter of months. That combination is very rare and hugely exciting.” – Robert Jäckle, Partner, Visionaries
Scaling CodeWords
The $9M raise will fund expansion of CodeWords’ go-to-market and engineering teams. The goal is straightforward: make Cody the agent that runs in the background of every business – learning, anticipating, and acting – so that teams without IT resources can operate like ones that have one.
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