The traditional venture capital wisdom that startups need co-founding teams is being challenged as solo founders demonstrate that in the AI era they can move faster and raise capital just as effectively.
The trend is playing out globally, but has also reached Australian shores with Lucent founder Alisa Wu’s lightning fast fundraise the latest proof point.
Wu secured $2 million in a pre-seed round from Long Journey Ventures, Horizon VC, Weekend Fund and others in just 36 hours – before she had any employees or product.
Wu’s company hopes to tackle one of AI’s most pressing needs: training data. While OpenAI and Anthropic have billions to spend, they’re bottlenecked on getting the right data to train their models. Wu spotted a specific gap – browser interaction data that would help AI agents book flights, fill forms, and complete online purchases – and built Lucent to fill it.