When Max Brodeur-Urbas co-founded Gumloop in mid-2023, his vision was to help non-technical employees automate repetitive tasks using AI. At the time, the concept of AI agents was still largely experimental and error-prone.
As AI technology has matured, so has Gumloop’s offering.
The company says it now enables teams at organizations like Shopify, Ramp, Gusto, Samsara, Instacart, and Opendoor to deploy trusted AI agents that autonomously handle complex, multi-step tasks, all without the need for an engineer.
Employees can share the agents they create with their colleagues, creating a compounding effect that accelerates internal automation. “They get addicted, start creating more agents, and suddenly the entire company is AI native,” Brodeur-Urbas told TechCrunch.
As companies rush to adopt AI, Benchmark general partner Everett Randell believes the key to success lies in equipping every worker with AI superpowers, and Gumloop’s intuitive agent builder is an example of the type of tool that will unlock that potential.
That’s why Randell, who joined Benchmark last October from Kleiner Perkins, chose to lead a $50 million Series B investment in Gumloop. The deal, which is Randell’s first at his new firm, included participation from Nexus VP, First Round Capital, Y Combinator, Box Group, The Cannon Project and Shopify.
Although Gumloop was not actively seeking new capital, the startup decided this was the year to “step on the accelerator.” For Brodeur-Urbas, partnering with Benchmark (the company behind icons like eBay, Uber and Dropbox) was a “no brainer.”
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While Brodeur-Urbas previously planned to “build a 10-person, multibillion-dollar company,” growing demand from enterprise customers has prompted him to create a dedicated sales force and expand his engineering team, he said.
Gumloop is by no means the only player vying to turn every knowledge worker into an AI builder agent. The startup faces stiff competition from established automation platforms like Zapier and n8n, as well as niche agent builders like Dust. Even fundamental AI labs are entering the scene. For example, Anthropic’s Claude Co-Work allows users to create autonomous agents without writing a single line of code.
But Randell believes Gumloop is superior to all its rivals. During his due diligence, he discovered that at least one of the company’s customers had adopted Gumloop somewhat organically.
When Randell asked a CTO how they chose Gumloop, the answer was revealing. The company had given employees full access to Gumloop along with two competitors. Six months later, the results were clear: Staff were using Gumloop daily or weekly, while competing tools remained intact, Randell told TechCrunch.
The reason Gumloop gained such momentum, according to Randell, is its minimal learning curve. “You can jump in and start creating agents and workflow automations right away,” he said.
While many AI startups worry that foundational models will replicate the same functionality and make them obsolete, Randell is convinced that Gumloop’s model-agnostic approach is precisely what will continue to attract customers.
As models continue to evolve, one may perform better than another for a specific task. Therefore, Gumloop provides the flexibility to choose the model that best suits the job at any given time.
Another reason model independence is attractive, according to Randell, is cost. “A lot of companies have credits from OpenAI, Gemini and Anthropic. They want to use them all,” he said.
Randell’s enthusiasm for the company ultimately comes down to the sheer size of the opportunity.
“Business automation is a huge gold mine,” he said. “I think it’s the most important category in enterprise AI.”
