Developers Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal feel that AI has the potential to automate many business-related tasks, but that many of the 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 — for example, they assume it can handle highly specialized and niche workloads where accuracy matters.
“If users ever want to use AI for enterprise purposes, the technology really needs to have no margin for error,” Brodeur-Urbas said. “Leaving specific workflows completely up to AI is not realistic. Users will pay for (an AI) to spin its wheels doing 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 had narrower promising applications. So they started thinking about ways they could squeeze what Brodeur-Urbas called “real value” out of AI technology.
These ideas became a wrapper for the open source application Auto-GPT, then a proof of concept and eventually a startup: Gumloop. Gumloop automates repetitive workflows with AI, aiming to simplify basic tasks.
“We started the company in a bedroom in Vancouver as a side project,” said Brodeur-Urbas. “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 could have ever imagined.”
Gumloop offers a workflow builder that integrates with third-party apps and tools including GitHub, Gmail, Outlook and X. Users can drag modular components onto a canvas to build automations or choose from pre-built task pipelines such as generating daily stock reports and summarizing documents.
Brodeur-Urbas claims the teams at Instacart and Rippling are using Gumloop for different use cases.
“Today, thousands of users rely on Gumloop as an essential tool for their business,” he said. “Giving non-technical people the tools to solve their problems without relying on engineers is where we found market traction.”
There is no shortage of workflow automation tools out there. Parabola, Tines, Induced AI, and Nanonets come to mind. And on the horizon are “agent” tools from OpenAI and others, which promise to automate more complex end-to-end tasks.
To remain nimble, Gumloop plans to keep its team fairly small. The company is hiring, but Brodeur-Urbas said the plan is to limit the number of employees to 10 people.
“Using artificial intelligence to code allows us to have the throughput of a 20-person team and outpace our competitors,” he claimed. “Our plan is to be a 10-person, billion-dollar company.”
As it prepares to relocate from Vancouver to San Francisco, Gumloop has 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 co-founder of Databricks and lead architect Reynold Xin. To date, Gumloop has raised $20 million in capital.
“We didn’t need the money at all,” Brodeur-Urbas said. “Raising money isn’t the goal – it’s building a product that people love. This new venture capital will help us build and scale that product even faster.”
