London startup CodeWords has raised a $9 million Seed round to make AI agents more usable by non-technical teams such as marketers or agencies.
The round was led by Visionaries, with participation from firstminute capital, Sequel, and Illusian, alongside founder-angels from Miro, ElevenLabs, Personio, Zalando and Supercell.
CodeWords’s product is Cody, an AI agent that lets users describe a business task in plain English, then builds and runs the automation for them. Instead of making non-technical teams wrestle with tools such as Claude Code, n8n, Zapier or internal scripts, the user tells Cody what they want done, and it connects the relevant tools, deploys the workflow and keeps it running.
Over an interview with Pathfounders, Co-founder Aymeric Zhuo said the company’s original mission was broad: “Three years ago, when we started, we simply wanted to empower anyone to create software.” But while a wave of ‘vibe coding’ tools has made it easier to spin up websites and apps, non-technical teams are still at a disadvantage.
“We want to focus on enabling the non-technical people to build automations and workflows,” Zhuo said. “The more complex part of the software stack… requires the more technical sides of backends and microservices. So we really want to focus on enabling non-technical people to build production-ready software here.”
Co-founder Osman Ramadan added: “We're like, the lovable for automation. I think.”
The company says Cody is already running 120,000 workflows a month. Examples include monitoring deal flow, routing social content for approval over WhatsApp, automating lead generation, and sending follow-up reminders after meetings.
The key distinction, the founders argue, is that CodeWords does not just output code. Zhuo said tools such as Claude Code “output code,” while CodeWords is meant to “output production-ready software that can achieve tasks.”
Ramadan said the company is targeting a much less technical user than most AI coding products. “We target people who don’t even know what a JSON is,” he said. “There’s so much friction in the market that people undermine, especially security… non-technical people don’t know where to save the environment variables, how they run, how they share stuff. This is where we feel like we can take the big share of the market.”
That focus also explains why CodeWords is trying to own the infrastructure layer, not just the agent interface. Ramadan said the company runs workflows on its own infrastructure so they can be isolated, tested and secured. Zhuo compared the strategy to Amazon building AWS for itself first.
“In our case, we built AWS before non-technical people,” Zhuo said. “We’re dogfooding not only our own agent that builds these automations and workflows, but also the whole infrastructure piece, which has nothing to do with AI. One of the reasons why we believe our business is going to sustain over time is because without AI, our business is still the infrastructure side of things.”
CodeWords began life as Agemo, an AI research lab working on neurosymbolic reasoning through code, before the founders pivoted toward a more immediate commercial problem: making agents useful for operators, marketers, agencies and go-to-market teams.
Alongside the fundraise, CodeWords is launching contextual memory, WhatsApp support, and task-specific Cody modes, designed to let the agent learn from past activity and adapt how it plans and executes work.
The round also comes with unusually heavyweight European founder backing. Zhuo said Visionaries was introduced through a founder it had backed who had previously worked at OpenAI in London.
“They had the same ambition as us to become a European behemoth, but also moving cross-Atlantic to the US,” Zhuo said. “We’re not looking to sell this company. We’re looking to scale it in Europe, but also in the US.”
The founders’ own backstories are pretty unique. Zhuo grew up in French Guiana, the son of Chinese immigrant parents, before studying at École Polytechnique and working on Candy Crush and TikTok. Ramadan grew up outside Khartoum in Sudan, taught himself to code at 11 without a computer, later studied at Cambridge and worked at Microsoft.
Ramadan said the two bonded quickly over “resilience and ambition.”
The new funding will be used to expand CodeWords’ engineering and go-to-market teams as it tries to turn AI agents from a developer toy into a business operating layer for everyone else.
