London-based AI agent startup CodeWords, which has built a platform for automating workflows, has raised a $9m seed round led by Visionaries, with participation from Firstminute Capital, Sequel and Illusian.
A roster of high-profile angels including Miro CEO Andrey Khusid, ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski and Ilkka Paananen of Supercell also invested.
Since the AI funding boom kicked off, a number of companies have pursued the portion of the market which includes non-technical workers whose lives can be made easier through automation, but who can’t code the applications they need.
“We wanted to enable non-technical people to create software simply,” says cofounder Aymeric Zhuo. “You don’t need technical expertise anymore, because today coding is solved for us.”
Osman Ramadan, the company's other cofounder, says the company aims to bridge the gap between vibe-coding companies which allow you to create prototypes with no coding experience, and more complex workflow automation companies that require some technical understanding to make them useful.
“We want to make it as easy as vibe-coding a website but with the same complexity as an N8n,” he says, referring to the German workflow automation startup.
How CodeWords works
An example use case CodeWords shows on its website is a user prompting the platform to monitor their competitor’s pricing page every three days and alert them when prices change.
They type in the prompt on a standard chat interface and, after “thinking” for a few seconds, Cody — the platform's AI agent — implements a four-step workflow which will report back to the user on a scheduled basis. Updates can be dropped into WhatsApp, or Slack.
Other applications include finance teams using it to monitor dealflow; content agencies using it to scrape social media and suggest social posts; and an automation agency using it to build a fleet of agents to deliver lead generation services to a client.
The platform already runs 500k workflows a month for non-technical teams, agencies and go-to-market operators. CodeWords is also starting to sign its first enterprise deals, Zhuo says.
The company offers more than 3,000 integrations, including Asana, Dropbox and Facebook. You can also hook it up to Chrome.
CodeWords currently employs 14 people in London, but wants to use the fresh funding to open an office in San Francisco and increase headcount across its go-to-market and engineering teams.
Taking on the market
CodeWords is operating in a “very competitive space”, says Robert Jäckle, a partner at Visionaries who led the firm’s deal into the company. Visionaries is also an investor in N8n.
Other companies that offer vibe-coding tools for non-technical users include Lovable, which raised $330m in December and is valued at $6.6bn. Claude Code — the coding assistant built by Anthropic — also offers similar capabilities.
Jäckle says what differentiates CodeWords from its competitors is the ability for non-technical people to use it to automate swathes of complex business tasks which would otherwise require some level of coding knowledge.
“So far the automations non-technical people have been able to build didn’t allow for the complexity of real business life. This is where we’ve been impressed with CodeWords and the team, this is the first time we feel this gap has been bridged.”
He thinks long-term CodeWords’s platform could become the infrastructure small businesses run on.
“At the end of the day a business is all these disjointed, separate tasks and jobs to be done, and I think if you’ve built the foundation and infrastructure that can automate these complex tasks with non technical input, maybe this is the infrastructure that a lot of SMBs are more or less going to run on in the future.”
