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Developers Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal believe that AI has the potential to automate many business-related tasks, but many AI-powered automation tools on the market today are unreliable and expensive. Part of the problem is that users expect too much from AI, Brodeur-Urbas told TechCrunch — assuming, for example, that it can handle highly specialized, niche workloads where accuracy is important.
“If users ever want to use AI for enterprise purposes, the technology really shouldn’t have any margin for error,” Brodeur-Urbas said. he said. “Leaving specific workflows entirely to AI is not realistic. Users will pay (AI) to spin their wheels by performing the same Google search over and over again.
However, Brodeur-Urbas, a former Microsoft software engineer, and Behal, formerly a software developer at Amazon Web Services, thought today’s AI has narrower applications. So they started thinking about ways to squeeze what Brodeur-Urbas calls “real value” out of AI technology.
These ideas became the wrapper for the open source application Automatic GPTthen a proof of concept and finally a startup: Gumloop. Gumloop automates repetitive workflows with artificial intelligence to simplify key tasks.
“We started the company as a side project in a bedroom in Vancouver,” Brodeur-Urbas said. “We were trying to solve a very simple problem for a bunch of non-technical people on a Discord server, and it turned into something bigger than we imagined.”
Gumloop provides a workflow builder that integrates with third-party apps and tools, including GitHub, Gmail, Outlook, and X. Users can drag modular components onto the canvas to create automation, or choose from pre-built pipelines for tasks such as creating daily stock reports and summarizing. documents.
Brodeur-Urbas claims that the Instacart and Rippling teams are using Gumloop for different use cases.
“Today, thousands of users trust Gumloop as the go-to tool for their businesses,” he said. “Giving non-technical people the tools to solve their own problems without relying on engineers is where we find market traction.”
There is no shortage of workflow automation tools out there. Parabola, Teeth, Induced AIand Nanonets come to mind And there are “agent” tools on the horizon OpenAI and others promise to automate more complex tasks end-to-end.
Gumloop plans to keep its team small enough to stay flexible. The company is hiring, but Brodeur-Urbas said the plan is to limit the number of employees to 10.
“Using artificial intelligence to code allows us to be the productivity of a 20-person team and outpace the competition,” he said. “Our plan is to be a 10-person, billion-dollar company.”
As it prepares to move from Vancouver to San Francisco, Gumloop closed 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. and chief architect Reynold Hin. To date, Gumloop has raised $20 million in capital.
“We didn’t need the money at all,” Brodeur-Urbas said. “The goal is not to collect money, but to create a product that people love. This new venture capital will help us build and scale that product even faster.”
