en.Wedoany.com Reported - Dublin-based PR intelligence company Everhaze has secured €450,000 in funding for the commercial launch of its conversational agentic AI product, Lú, in Ireland and the UK, which officially went live on July 6. The funding comes from three Irish family offices.

Everhaze targets PR firms, noting that against the backdrop of AI reshaping the industry, clients and procurement teams are driving PR agencies to shift towards outcome-based or capability-based pricing models. The company states that this shift is occurring at a time when the PR industry faces labor and skills shortages, even as demand for in-house positions continues to grow.

According to data from the PRII Census 2025, 83% of PR professionals work more hours than their contracts stipulate, averaging nearly 10 extra hours per week. The share of in-house PR roles within the Irish government has grown from 25% of the PR workforce in 2019 to 42% in 2025.

Lú is designed as a conversational agentic AI that users can contact via text, voice messages, or phone calls through WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, or Everhaze's own platform, and the tool will complete tasks on behalf of the user. Everhaze states that Lú has been confirmed to perform 48 independent tasks, including text editing, media list management, media monitoring, and report generation.

Everhaze CEO James McCann stated that the demand for PR is growing faster than the capacity of PR firms and in-house teams. "This is an excellent recognition of the importance of the discipline, but more and more positions are going unfilled, and the industry's workforce is being overworked," he said. He added, "As the skills gap widens, more tools and AI bring more labor, greater pressure, and lower availability. With Lú, we seek to rebalance these dynamics and fundamentally address the industry's key challenges."

McCann previously founded tech PR firm ClearStory International, whose clients included Techstars, HubSpot, and Coindesk, and which was sold last year to digital media company Core Optimisation. The three family offices supporting Everhaze have a combined net worth of over €350 million, including Astogo Holdings (the family office of Jim Curley, who sold his stake in Jones Engineering in 2022), the Kearns family office (former owners of an education college), and hotelier Mark Cosgrave, owner of the Hendrick Hotel in Smithfield.