Former Marist student expands AI startup across 18 markets

By Rebekah O'Reilly

Tech entrepreneur Lorcan Ó Catháin, a former Marist College student, has brought his start-up Lua AI to 18 markets across the world in just six months.

The son of two Dubliners, his father is the well-known Professor Ciarán Ó Catháin, who served as president of Athlone IT for more than two decades, and now serves as CEO of a third-level institute in the Middle Eastern country of Bahrain.

Lorcan spent his childhood in Northern Ireland. The family then moved to Athlone, where he attended secondary school in the Marist College.

In those years, he displayed his ambitious nature through track and field, where he achieved a number of record-breaking times.

“If you asked me ten years ago what I'd be doing, I would've said I'd be running in a straight line as fast as I can,” he joked.

“I only really discovered technology later, during my undergraduate degree.”

Lorcan completed an undergraduate degree in International Relations in DCU, before going on to study for a Masters in Economic History in London School of Economics.

“I always thought I'd work as an economist,” he said, going on to explain that a website created to help Irish students to get home to vote in the Marriage Referendum in 2015 was his first foray into tech.

“There was a lot of students who couldn't afford to fly home to vote. I built a website to crowdfund travel.

“We covered about 50% of the ticket costs, and a bunch of people got home. It was my first experience with technology, and I realised it was an incredible way to create impact at scale.”

Following the completion of his Masters in London, Lorcan moved straight into the world of technology, working for Rocket Internet, a German that specialises in development start-ups.

He then moved into economics, working in Ethiopia and Rwanda advising governments on SME development and industrial policy.

Lorcan later returned to technology, working as the Chief Operating Officer of a Kenyan fintech company 4G Capital, where he scaled the business to over 600 employees.

According to Forbes, the company assists small businesses in sub-Saharan Africa, who are unable to secure financing from traditional banks, by sending credit in the form of mobile money directly to customers' phones.

As of March 2020, the company had already disbursed over $90 million in loans to 100,000 micro, small and medium enterprises.

Lua AI was co-founded with Stefan Kruger, who Lorcan met eight years ago, as the pair worked together a 4G Capital.

In early 2024, Stefan approached Lorcan again about moving into the AI space. They noted that there was a “huge interest in making AI more accessible”.

“We left our jobs in March 2025, and launched our first product in June,” Lorcan said.

The company currently has a core team of 12 people and eight AI agents, and hopes to grow to a team of 40 people in the coming year.

Lua AI launched its second product, the Agent Builder, the company's core product, in October last, and has since expanded operations to 18 unique markets around the world

“It’s been exciting to see how quickly the product has expanded geographically,” Lorcan said.

“The growth speaks as much to the market opportunity as it does to the team.”

In April of this year, Lua raised €4.9 million in seed funding, to take their start-up to the next level.

“We’ve been lucky to bring on some amazing investors across the US, Europe, and emerging markets. It’s a really exciting moment for us,” Lorcan said.

“The funding is going into growing the team and investing in our developer community and implementation partners.

“We have people all over the world building businesses and products on Lua, so the focus is on giving as much back to them as possible, through training, education, and support.”

Explaining how the technology operates, Lorcan said Lua AI completes repetitive tasks with efficiency.

“The best way to approach it is to take a role with repetitive, high-frequency tasks and give the agent structure, like a job description, goals, and accountability.

“You manage it like a person, with performance reviews and updates. Agents are now being used across almost every department in large organisations.”

He said common uses of Lua AI in business include roles involving data ingestion, claims processing, onboarding tools, customer discovery, and salesforce gamification.

“The premise behind Lua is that companies need to think about their agent workforce with the same intentionality as their human workforce.

“[It] is essentially a HR manager for AI agents, it’s where companies build, manage, and collaborate with them.”

Speaking about the biggest challenges faced by Lua AI and other similar companies, Lorcan said customer education was one of the biggest hurdles.

“It’s an incredibly new field and it’s changing all the time,” he said.

“A lot of businesses know they need AI, but they don’t know what that actually means or how to implement it. We spend a lot of time helping companies understand which use cases make sense and which don’t.”

When asked what he would have concerns about the implications of AI on the job market, Lorcan said that Lua AI is used to enhance employee productivity.

“What we’re seeing is that AI is creating more opportunity and making people more productive. Everything we build is about helping individuals to increase their output.

“If you can do that, you’re not going to be replaced, your company will just grow faster.”