Builders Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal suppose that AI has the potential to automate plenty of business-relevant duties, however that lots of the AI-powered automation instruments in the marketplace at present are unreliable and dear. A part of the issue is that customers anticipate an excessive amount of of AI, Brodeur-Urbas informed TechCrunch — as an example, they assume that it could deal with extremely specialised, area of interest workloads the place precision issues.
“If users ever want to use AI for enterprise purposes, the technology really has to have no margin for error,” Brodeur-Urbas mentioned. “Leaving specific workflows completely up to AI is not realistic. Users would be paying for [an AI] to spin its wheels performing the same Google search over and over again.”
Nonetheless, Brodeur-Urbas, an ex-Microsoft software program engineer, and Behal, beforehand a software program developer at Amazon Internet Companies, thought at present’s AI had promising narrower purposes. In order that they began desirous about methods they might squeeze what Brodeur-Urbas referred to as “real value” out of AI tech.
These concepts turned a wrapper for the open supply app Auto-GPT, then a proof-of-concept, and finally a startup: Gumloop. Gumloop automates repetitive workflows with AI, aiming to streamline primary duties.
“We started the company in a bedroom in Vancouver as a side project,” Brodeur-Urbas mentioned. “We were trying to solve a very simple problem for a group of nontechnical people in a Discord server, and it spiralled into something larger than we could have ever imagined.”
Gumloop gives a workflow builder that integrates with third-party apps and instruments together with GitHub, Gmail, Outlook, and X. Customers can drag modular elements onto a canvas to construct automations, or select from prebuilt pipelines for duties like producing each day inventory reviews and summarizing paperwork.
Brodeur-Urbas claims that groups at Instacart and Rippling are utilizing Gumloop for numerous use instances.
“Today, thousands of users rely on Gumloop as a core tool for their business,” he mentioned. “Giving nontechnical people the tools to solve their own problems without relying on engineers is where we found market pull.”
There’s no scarcity of workflow automation instruments on the market. Parabola, Tines, Induced AI, and Nanonets come to thoughts. And on the horizon are “agentic” instruments from OpenAI and others, which promise to automate extra advanced duties end-to-end.
To stay nimble, Gumloop plans to maintain its group fairly small. The corporate is hiring, however Brodeur-Urbas mentioned that the plan is to cap headcount at 10 individuals.
“Using AI to code let us have the throughput of a 20-person team and outpace competitors,” he claimed. “Our plan is to be a 10-person, billion-dollar company.”
Because it prepares to relocate from Vancouver to San Francisco, Gumloop has closed a $17 million Collection A spherical led by Nexus Enterprise Companions with participation from First Spherical Capital, Y Combinator, and angel traders together with Instacart co-founder Max Mullen and Databricks co-founder and chief architect Reynold Xin. So far, Gumloop has raised $20 million in capital.
“We didn’t need the money at all,” Brodeur-Urbas mentioned. “Raising money isn’t the goal — building a product people love is. This new venture capital will help us build and scale that product even faster.”
