Developers Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal consider that AI has the potential to automate many business-relevant tasks, but that lots of the AI-powered automation tools in the marketplace today are unreliable and expensive. Part of the issue is that users expect an excessive amount of from AI, Brodeur-Urbas told TechCrunch — for instance, they assume it will possibly handle highly specialized, area of interest workloads where precision is essential.
“If users are ever going to make use of AI for business purposes, the technology really should have no room for error,” Brodeur-Urbas said. “It shouldn’t be realistic to go away certain workflows entirely to AI. Users would pay to have (an AI) spin its wheels and do the identical Google search over and once more.”
Still, Brodeur-Urbas, a former software engineer at Microsoft, and Behal, previously a software engineer at Amazon Web Services, believed that today's AI offers more promising, narrower applications. So they began fascinated with learn how to extract what Brodeur-Urbas called “real value” from AI technology.
These ideas became a wrapper for the open source Auto-GPT app, then a proof of concept, and at last a startup: Gumloop. Gumloop automates repetitive workflows with AI and goals to streamline basic tasks.
“We began the corporate as a side project in a bedroom in Vancouver,” Brodeur-Urbas said. “We tried to unravel a quite simple problem for a bunch of non-technical people on a Discord server, and it grew into something larger than we could have ever imagined.”
Gumloop offers a workflow builder that integrates with third-party apps and tools, including GitHub, Gmail, Outlook, and Docs.
Brodeur-Urbas claims that teams at Instacart and Rippling are using Gumloop for various use cases.
“Today, hundreds of users depend on Gumloop as a central tool for his or her business,” he said. “We found market appeal by giving non-technical people the tools to unravel their very own problems without counting on engineers.”
There is not any shortage of workflow automation tools. Parabola, prongs, induced AI and nanonets come to mind. And on the horizon are “agentic” tools from OpenAI and others that promise to automate more complex tasks end-to-end.
In order to stay flexible, Gumloop plans to maintain its team quite small. The company is hiring latest employees, but Brodeur-Urbas said the plan is to limit the variety of employees to 10.
“By using AI to code, we will achieve the throughput of a 20-person team and outperform the competition,” he claimed. “Our plan is to be a ten-person, billion-dollar company.”
As it prepares to maneuver from Vancouver to San Francisco, Gumloop has raised a $17 million Series A round led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from First Round Capital, Y Combinator and angel investors including Instacart- Co-founder Max Mullen and Databricks co-founder, graduated and chief architect Reynold Xin. To date, Gumloop has raised $20 million in capital.
“We didn’t need the cash in any respect,” Brodeur-Urbas said. “The goal shouldn’t be to boost money, but to create a product that individuals love. This latest enterprise capital will help us construct and scale this product even faster.”
