Developers Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal think AI has the potential to automate many business-related tasks, but most AI-powered automation tools on the market today are unreliable and expensive. Part of the problem, Brodeur-Urbas told TechCrunch, is that consumers expect too much from AI — for example, It is highly specialized, where accuracy is important. They are considered to be able to handle specialized tasks.
“If users want to use AI for business purposes, the technology needs to be truly error-free.” He said.. “Leaving specific workflows entirely to AI is not practical. Users will pay for the (AI) to spin its wheels doing the same Google search over and over again.”
Still, Brodeur-Urbas, a former Microsoft software engineer, and Behal, a software developer at Amazon Web Services, think today's AI has narrower application potential. So they started thinking about ways to squeeze what Brodeur-Urbas calls “true value” out of AI technology.
These ideas became a wrapper for the open source app. Auto-GPTThen a proof of concept; Finally a start: Gumloop. Gumloop automates repetitive workflows with AI with the aim of streamlining basic tasks.
“We started the company as a side project in a bedroom in Vancouver,” Brodeur-Urbas said. “We set out to solve a very simple problem for a group of non-technical people on a Discord server, and it turned into something bigger than we ever imagined.”
Gumloop is GitHub; Gmail Outlook and provides a workflow builder that integrates with third-party apps and tools, including X. Users can drag modular components onto the canvas to build automation systems or choose from pre-built pipelines for tasks such as generating and summarizing daily stock reports. Documents.
Brodeur-Urbas says the teams at Instacart and Rippling are using Gumloop for a variety of use cases.
“Today, thousands of users rely on Gumloop as the primary tool for their business,” 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. Parabola, The irons, A motivated AIversus Nanonets come to mind On the horizon are “agent” tools. OpenAI Others promise end-to-end automation of more complex tasks.
to be agile; Gumloop plans to keep its team small. Although the company is hiring, Brodeur-Urbas said the program limits headcount to 10 people.
“A team of 20 people to code using AI puts them ahead of the competition,” he says. “Our plan is to be a 10-person, multibillion-dollar company.”
As Gumloop prepares to move from Vancouver to San Francisco, first round Capital, Y Combinator has closed a $17 million Series A round led by Nexus Venture Partners, which includes Instacart co-founder Max Mullen and Databricks co-founder. Reynold Xin, a great architect. to date, Gumloop has raised $20 million in capital.
“We don't need any money at all,” Brodeur-Urbas said. “Making money is not the goal of building a product that people love. This new venture capital will help us build this product quickly and at scale.”