In 2022, João Moura led the AI development efforts at Clearbit, a startup that created a unified hub for business intelligence tools. There, Moura was liable for leading the event of AI integrations and defining Clearbit's AI product roadmap.
After a 12 months, HubSpot acquired Clearbit and Moura felt the urge to go it alone. He had founded startups before, including Urdog, which sold a sensible collar for pets. But with this breakthrough, Moura had a more technically ambitious concept in mind.
Moura's newest enterprise, CrewAIgoals to automate repetitive back-office tasks comparable to aggregating reports and worker onboarding. Customers can create workflow automations using the CrewAI platform after which deploy and track them via a dashboard.
CrewAI doesn’t train AI models itself. Rather, the corporate uses models from providers comparable to OpenAI and Anthropic to drive automation. Companies can construct workflows on top of the apps they already use to automate things like enriching marketing databases, analyzing customer feedback, and forecasting trends.
Moura introduces CrewAI as a substitute for robotic process automation (RPA). RPA drives workflow automation. But it’s a much stricter form based on preset “if-then” rules.
“We've made it easy for teams to form groups of AI 'agents' to perform tasks using any model, integrate with greater than a thousand different applications, and achieve this in a way that protects their privacy,” said Moura. “We encourage our customers to try multiple models and choose the models that deliver the most effective results for specific business use cases.”
RPA is indeed brittle – and error-prone. A 2022 Opinion poll from Robocorp, an RPA provider, found that 69% of corporations that said they’d implemented RPA experienced disrupted workflows no less than once every week. Entire businesses have been made out of helping corporations manage their RPA installations and forestall them from breaking.
Of course, AI may also break – or slightly, hallucinate and suffer the results of bias. Still, Moura argues that it’s a way more robust technology than RPA.
Investors appear to agree. CrewAI has raised $18 million in seed and Series A rounds from backers including Boldstart Ventures, Craft Ventures, Earl Gray Capital and Insight Partners. Coursera co-founder and AI entrepreneur Andrew Ng also invested, as did Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot.
CrewAI has plenty of competition. Orby, Bardeen (which can be funded by HubSpot), Tektonic, 11x.ai, Twin Labs, and Emergence are all developing similar AI-powered, business-focused workflow automation products. Traditional RPA vendors like Automation Anywhere and UiPath, meanwhile, are working to integrate more AI technology into their tools to remain relevant.
Currently valued at around $100 million, CrewAI has managed to amass a major number of consumers – 150 – in its first 12 months. (CrewAI launched in January.) And it goals to do much more of the identical with Enterprise Cloud, a brand new managed subscription plan.
Built on open source components that CrewAI released last 12 months, Enterprise Cloud provides additional access controls and analytics to secure and audit automations. Subscribers also receive “VIP” support and workflow templates.
“We see 100,000 sets of multi-AI executions on daily basis across lots of of various use cases,” Moura said. “Given our current pipeline, we may very well be money flow positive by next summer.”
CrewAI, which relies in San Francisco and Brazil, plans to make use of the funds raised to date to expand its 16-person workforce and expand its core automation products.
