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 available on the market immediately are unreliable and expensive. A part of the issue is that customers anticipate an excessive amount of of AI, Brodeur-Urbas informed TechCrunch — as an illustration, they assume that it could possibly deal with extremely specialised, area of interest workloads the place precision issues.
“If customers ever wish to use AI for enterprise functions, the expertise actually has to don’t have any margin for error,” Brodeur-Urbas mentioned. “Leaving particular workflows utterly as much as AI just isn’t lifelike. Customers could be paying for [an AI] to spin its wheels performing the identical Google search over and over.”
Nonetheless, Brodeur-Urbas, an ex-Microsoft software program engineer, and Behal, beforehand a software program developer at Amazon Internet Companies, thought immediately’s AI had promising narrower functions. In order that they began eager about methods they may squeeze what Brodeur-Urbas referred to as “actual worth” 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 fundamental duties.
“We began the corporate in a bed room in Vancouver as a aspect mission,” Brodeur-Urbas mentioned. “We had been attempting to unravel a quite simple downside for a gaggle of nontechnical folks in a Discord server, and it spiralled into one thing bigger than we may 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 parts onto a canvas to construct automations, or select from prebuilt pipelines for duties like producing each day inventory studies and summarizing paperwork.
Brodeur-Urbas claims that groups at Instacart and Rippling are utilizing Gumloop for numerous use instances.
“Immediately, 1000’s of customers depend on Gumloop as a core device for his or her enterprise,” he mentioned. “Giving nontechnical folks the instruments to unravel their very own issues with out counting on engineers is the place we discovered 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 staff fairly small. The corporate is hiring, however Brodeur-Urbas mentioned that the plan is to cap headcount at 10 folks.
“Utilizing AI to code let us have the throughput of a 20-person staff and outpace opponents,” he claimed. “Our plan is to be a 10-person, billion-dollar firm.”
Because it prepares to relocate from Vancouver to San Francisco, Gumloop has closed a $17 million Sequence 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. To this point, Gumloop has raised $20 million in capital.
“We didn’t want the cash in any respect,” Brodeur-Urbas mentioned. “Elevating cash isn’t the objective — constructing a product folks love is. This new enterprise capital will assist us construct and scale that product even quicker.”
