Again in 2022, João Moura was directing AI engineering efforts at Clearbit, a startup making a unified hub for enterprise intelligence instruments. There, Moura was chargeable for main the event of AI integrations, in addition to defining Clearbit’s AI product roadmap.
After a yr, HubSpot acquired Clearbit, and Moura had the itch to go it alone. He’d based startups earlier than, together with Urdog, which offered a sensible collar for pets. However this go-around, Moura had a extra technically bold idea in thoughts.
Moura’s latest firm, CrewAI, goals to automate repetitive, back-office duties like summarizing stories and onboarding staff. Prospects can construct workflow automations utilizing CrewAI’s platform, then deploy and observe them from a dashboard.
CrewAI doesn’t practice AI fashions itself. Relatively, the corporate faucets fashions from distributors similar to OpenAI and Anthropic to drive automations. Corporations can construct workflows on high of the apps they already use to automate issues like enriching advertising and marketing databases, analyzing buyer suggestions, and forecasting tendencies.
Moura pitches CrewAI as an alternative choice to robotic course of automation, or RPA. RPA drives workflow automation. Nevertheless it’s a way more inflexible type primarily based on “if-then” preset guidelines.
“We have made it easy for teams to build groups of AI ‘agents’ to perform tasks using any model, integrate with more than a thousand different applications, and to do so in a way that protects their data privacy,” Moura mentioned. “We encourage our customers to try multiple models and pick the models that provide the best results for specific business use cases.”
RPA is certainly brittle — and error-prone. A 2022 survey from Robocorp, an RPA vendor, discovered that of the organizations that mentioned they’d adopted RPA, 69% skilled damaged workflows at the very least as soon as weekly. Whole companies have been made out of serving to enterprises handle their RPA installations and forestall them from breaking.
After all, AI can break, too — or relatively, hallucinate and endure from the results of bias. Nonetheless, Moura argues that it’s a much more resilient tech than RPA.
Buyers appear to agree. CrewAI has raised $18 million throughout seed and Sequence A rounds from backers together with Boldstart Ventures, Craft Ventures, Earl Gray Capital, and Perception Companions. Coursera co-founder and AI enterpreneur Andrew Ng has additionally invested, as has Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder and CTO of HubSpot.
CrewAI has competitors in spades. Orby, Bardeen (which additionally has funding from HubSpot), Tektonic, 11x.ai, Twin Labs, and Emergence are all creating related AI-powered, business-focused workflow automation merchandise. Conventional RPA distributors like Automation Wherever and UiPath, in the meantime, are working to include extra AI tech into their instruments in an effort to remain related.
To its credit score, CrewAI, which is at the moment valued at round $100 million, has managed to draw a sizeable variety of clients — 150 — in its first yr. (CrewAI launched in January.) And it’s angling to land extra with Enterprise Cloud, a brand new managed subscription plan.
Constructed on high of open supply parts CrewAI has launched over the previous yr, Enterprise Cloud gives extra entry controls and analytics to assist safe and audit automations. Subscribers additionally get “VIP” assist and templates for workflows.
“We are seeing 100,000 groups of multi-AI executions per day across hundreds of different use cases,” Moura mentioned. “Given our current pipeline, we could be cash-flow-positive by next summer.”
CrewAI, which relies in San Francisco and Brazil, plans to make use of the money it has raised thus far to develop its 16-person workforce and develop its core automation merchandise.
