Lucy Labs is a Madrid-based AI company. We are a Delaware C-Corp parent with a Spanish operating subsidiary, founded by Travis Sheppard, in design-partner development.
Lucy Labs builds Lucy: a cloud-backed desktop AI coach that helps domain experts, people with lived experience, and individuals across work and life turn their context into AI-supported solutions for the work, decisions, and daily needs already in front of them. We are European-founded, Madrid-based, and structurally Europe-first.
We share a name with several unrelated entities — see the FAQ at the bottom of this page for the disambiguation.
When electricity replaced steam in the 1880s, productivity didn't move for forty years.
The first electrification of factories ran electric motors through the same overhead shafts and belt systems that had run on steam. The tool was new; the work design was old.
Productivity moved a generation later — when factories rebuilt around electric motors per workstation. Small motors. Distributed. Applied where the work happened.
The technology has shipped: ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini, the agent platforms. The shared 20% of every job is being absorbed by general tools. The 80% needs people who understand it to redesign it.
Lucy is the missing link between the people who understand the work and the AI tools that could revolutionize it. The redesign happens when the people doing the work become the people building the AI agents for the work.
See the theory of change in long-form below for the deeper economic thesis · how Lucy works for the mechanism.
Our founder ran the Evolutionary Framework — Trust → Personal value → Adoption → Capability → Scale — in human-only mode for 20 years. Lucy is the AI-native version of that operating model.
20 years of operating in the framework before naming it. Travis Sheppard founded Lucy Labs after 20+ years building and scaling transformation programs at high-growth companies. The pattern that became Lucy's Evolutionary Framework — earning trust before doing anything heavy, landing personal value before asking for adoption, building capability so it stays with the workforce, scaling bottom-up — wasn't a thesis Travis arrived at; it was the operating model he kept finding worked.
Lucy is the AI-native version of an operating model he wished he'd had himself.
CompUSA + Sprint — while a full-time student
#1 sales manager nationally; top 12 of 15,000+ retail sales consultants.
Austin Networking Associates — while a full-time student
Technical Sales Consultant on Juniper network and security products; 140%+ quota attainment.
Built the customer-success and operational transformation function from $0 to $50M ARR.
The company sold to Dell for $1.2B largely on the operating-model strength.
Led the global customer-success organization.
$98M ARR at 25× ROI in a single fiscal year. Near-zero attrition.
COO of a 7,000-person operation in transition.
Turned the operational metrics around in 9 months without disrupting the customer relationships that mattered.
Near-zero attrition is the proof point. The Evolutionary Framework — Trust → Personal value → Adoption → Capability → Scale — produces near-zero attrition wherever it's applied. People stay because the framework earns their trust before asking for behavior change, and earns their behavior change by landing personal value first. Lucy is that pattern made operational across the workforce.
Why now (the AI-native version). The same pattern works on AI rollout, but only if a coach can be present in flow with each individual at the moment the new pattern would replace the old one. A human coach can do this for one person at a time. Lucy can do it for everyone at once. — See the mechanism →
Creativity AI cannot. Lived experience AI cannot. Domain knowledge AI cannot. The work that creates the most leverage is the work that requires those things — the 80% that's specific to your customers, your operating model, your judgment. AI is the tool that makes the 80% buildable.
Lucy's design has GP-001 — AI augments human capability; AI does not replace human judgment — as an immutable principle. We do not build replacement; we build augmentation. We do not build autopilot; we build coaching. The human stays in the decision seat.
This phrase is more than a value statement; it's the architecture. The agents Lucy coaches you to build run when you choose. They produce outputs you review before they become commitments. The architecture refuses to invert the direction of authority.
See the trust architecture for how the architecture enforces this · /trust#for-employees for what it means at your desk.
We organize how we operate into three layers. Principles are immutable — they are the architectural floor. Values shape behavior across the company. Guardrails are the things we explicitly refuse, even when refusing costs us a deal or a hire.
AI augments human capability; AI does not replace human judgment.
The agency model. Lucy coaches; the human builds; the agent executes.
Trust is architectural, not bolt-on.
The V·C·C floor. The refusal scene. Stage-honest labels.
Capability stays with the human who built it.
The Coaching Loop teaches the pattern, not just the answer. Exit returns capability to the workforce.
The work the company creates value with is the work the company's people redesign.
Bottom-up scaling. Champion emergence. The 80% is workforce-built.
We surface weak assumptions and tradeoffs clearly; we don't soften unwelcome news.
We use concrete artifacts, named tools, and measured outcomes — not abstract enterprise vocabulary.
We talk about our roadmap honestly; we don't apologize for what's not shipped, and we don't oversell what is.
We help; we don't replace. We teach the pattern; we don't ship the answer.
We use what we build. Lucy Labs runs on Lucy.
We don't sell on AI fear ("you'll be replaced if you don't") and we don't sell on AI hype ("Lucy will transform everything"). The marketing surface is calibrated to the actual product.
Lucy's architecture refuses individual surveillance. Our Terms of Service contractually prohibit using Lucy for ranking, surveillance, or punitive disciplinary action. See the refusal scene for the full contract.
The Governing Principles above are immutable. We will not relax them for an enterprise deal. The architecture and the ToS together carry the principles into commercial behavior.
For the first time in history, a few-hour Lucy session with the right coaching can do what once needed a development team and months.
The cost of execution has collapsed. What used to require a software team and months can now be built in a few hours by the person who understands the work, with the right coaching. The bottleneck moved from implementation to design discipline.
The Capability Economy thesis. As execution gets cheap, durable advantage shifts to the companies whose people can decide what to execute, how to scope it, and how to verify it.
Skill-Biased Labor Enhancement. AI benefits the domain experts who develop the design discipline to use it on their specific work. Lucy spreads that discipline across the workforce instead of concentrating it in a small group.
The missing-link universal frame. Across every audience, the gap is the same: people have the context for the AI-supported solutions their work needs, but not the design discipline to turn that context into working agents.
See homepage Beat 4 for the compressed version · the investor narrative for the moats · how Lucy works for the mechanism that operationalizes it.
Lucy Labs is European-founded, Madrid-based, with a dual US / Spain structure — GDPR-native and EU-sovereign by construction, not as a compliance overlay.
Madrid-based. The operating company is in Madrid, Spain. The team works in Europe time. Customer engagements in Spain and the EU are direct; engagements outside the EU are coordinated through the parent.
Dual entity structure. Lucy Labs Inc. is a Delaware C-Corp parent. The operating subsidiary is a Spanish S.L. The structure carries US institutional fundraising and contracting compatibility while keeping the operating motion European-native.
GDPR-native and EU-sovereign by construction. We are not a US company that added GDPR after a security review. The architecture, the data flows, and the Terms of Service started inside European data-protection norms. EU-sovereign data residency is structural for EU customers; the Article 14 human-oversight commitments are architectural; works-council co-determination is part of the deployment posture, not a feature added after a sales conversation.
Mission-scope vs execution-sequence. Our mission is universal: enable every person on Earth to leverage AI to solve problems and improve their daily life. Our execution sequence is Europe-first, structurally — because the regulatory clarity, the workforce-rights infrastructure, and the public-sector deployment path are most coherent here, and because being European-founded makes us a more honest partner to those institutions. Geographic expansion follows execution maturity, not investor pressure.
Lucy Labs Inc.
Delaware C-Corp · US institutional fundraising and contracting compatibility.
Lucy Labs S.L.
Madrid-based operating subsidiary · European-native operating motion · GDPR-native by construction.
We have a real product, real customers in active deployment, and a clear roadmap. We are not yet at general availability. Some capabilities described across the site are available, some are planned, and some are planned for GA. The labels are honest; the roadmap is real.
Design-partner-shaped engagements. Our current commercial motion is the design-partner pilot, a single team, scoped users (typically 10–50), scoped window (typically 4–8 weeks), criteria written down before approval. The pilot's POV is production; the engagement is a real one, not a demo.
What "lab" means. A lab is a place where the team is always discovering, learning, and growing alongside design partners, not a place where the product is forever almost-ready. Lucy ships. Each generation of design partners works with a more mature product. The lab posture is the working culture, not the maturity stage.
