Lú to you: family office trio backs Everhaze ahead of UK launch

Everhaze, the Dublin-based PR-intelligence company, has raised €450k from three of Ireland’s most prominent family offices on the eve of the commercial launch of its conversational agentic AI product, Lú, across Ireland and the UK.

The company is primarily targeting public relations agencies, which are coming under increasing pressure from procurement managers and clients to offer outcome or capability-based pricing models as AI reshapes the industry. That shift is happening at a time when the sector is already facing a labour and skills shortage as demand for in-house roles continues to surge.

According to the latest PRII Census 2025, 83% of PR professionals are working beyond their contracted hours, by an average of nearly 10 extra hours a week. The Irish in-house public-sector share of the PR workforce, meanwhile, grew to 42% in 2025, up from 25% in 2019.

Lú is built as a conversational agentic AI. Users message it directly by text, voice note or phone call inside WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack or Everhaze itself, and it completes tasks on their behalf. Everhaze has identified 48 separate tasks Lú can carry out, ranging from everyday work such as text editing, media list management, media monitoring and report generation.

Speaking ahead of Lú’s commercial launch, James McCann, CEO of Everhaze, said:

“Demand for PR is growing faster than capacity across agencies and in-house teams. It’s a fantastic endorsement of the importance of the discipline, but it’s increasingly the case that roles are being left unfilled and the industry’s workforce is burning out. More tools and more AI have equaled more labour, more pressure and less accessibility, as the skills gap widens. With Lú, we are seeking to rebalance those dynamics and fundamentally address the industry’s key challenges.”

McCann is a former agency owner, having sold his previous firm, ClearStory International, to digital media agency Core Optimisation last July for an undisclosed sum. The agency counted well-known clients in the international technology sector, including Techstars, HubSpot and Coindesk, as well as accelerator programmes in the UAE and Singapore.

The three family offices backing Everhaze have a combined net worth of more than €350m: Astogo Holdings, the family office of Jim Curley, who sold his stake in Jones Engineering in 2022; the Kearns family office, former owners of the Institute of Education; and hotelier Mark Cosgrave, owner of the Hendrick Hotel in Smithfield and a member of the Cosgrave property-development family.

Lú launches publicly across Ireland and the UK on 6 July 2026.

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