Gumloop gets $50M from Benchmark to turn every employee into an AI-powered lead builder

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 have Gumloop’s offerings.

The company claims it now allows 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 requiring an engineer at all.

Employees can share the agents they create with their colleagues, creating a ripple effect that accelerates internal automation. “They got hooked, started building more agents, and then all of a sudden, the whole company became AI-based,” Brodeur Urbas told TechCrunch.

As companies race to adopt AI, Benchmark General Partner Everett Randle believes the key to success is empowering every worker with AI superpowers, and Gumloop’s intuitive agent builder is an example of the kind of tool that will unleash this potential.

That’s why Randle, who joined Benchmark last October from Kleiner Perkins, chose to lead a $50 million Series B investment in Gumloop. The deal, Randle’s first at his new company, 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 that this was the right year to “move on.” For Brodeur-Urbas, partnering with Benchmark — the company behind icons like eBay, Uber and Dropbox — was a “no-brainer.”

While Brodeur Urbas had previously planned to “build a 10-person, billion-dollar company,” growing demand from enterprise customers forced him to build 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-powered lead builder. The startup faces stiff competition from established automation platforms like Zapier and n8n, as well as niche agent builders like Dust. Even foundational AI labs are entering the fray. For example, Anthropic’s Claude Co-Work allows users to create standalone agents without writing a single line of code.

But Randle believes Gumloop outperforms all of its competitors. While conducting due diligence, he discovered that at least one of the company’s customers had adopted Gumloop somewhat organically.

When Randle asked the CTO how they chose Gumloop, the response was clear. The company gave employees full access to Gumloop alongside two competitors. After six months, the results were clear: Employees were using Gumloop daily or weekly, while competing tools remained unchanged, Randle told TechCrunch.

The reason Gumloop is gaining such momentum, according to Randle, is its minimal learning curve. “You can go in and start creating agents and automating workflows right away,” he said.

While many AI startups worry that foundational models will duplicate the same functionality and make it obsolete, Randle is convinced that Gumloop’s model-agnostic approach is exactly what will continue to attract customers.

As models continue to evolve, one model may perform better than another on a specific task. Therefore, Gumloop provides the flexibility to choose the most appropriate form for the job at any given moment.

Another reason model independence is attractive, according to Rundle, is cost. “A lot of companies have OpenAI, Gemini and Anthropic certifications. They want to use them all,” he said.

His enthusiasm for the company is ultimately due to the sheer scale of the opportunity.

“Enterprise automation is a huge amount of gold,” Randle said. “I think it’s the biggest category in enterprise AI.”