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 services.
The company claims that teams at organizations like Shopify, Ramp, Gusto, Samsara, Instacart, and Opendoor can now deploy reliable AI agents that autonomously handle complex multi-step tasks without the need for engineers.
Employees can share the agents they build with colleagues, creating a compounding effect that accelerates internal automation. “They get addicted and start building more and more agents, and all of a sudden the whole company becomes AI-native,” Brodeur-Urbas told TechCrunch.
As companies race to adopt AI, Benchmark General Partner Everett Rundle believes the key to success lies in empowering every employee with AI superpowers, and Gumloop’s intuitive agent builder is one example of a tool that can unlock that potential.
That’s why Randle, who joined Benchmark last October from Kleiner Perkins, chose to lead the company’s $50 million Series B investment in Gumloop. The deal was Randle’s first with the new company and included participation from Nexus VP, First Round Capital, Y Combinator, Box Group, The Cannon Project, and Shopify.
Although Gumloop wasn’t actively seeking new capital, the startup decided this was the year to “step on the gas.” For Brodeur-Urbas, partnering with Benchmark, the company behind icons for eBay, Uber, Dropbox, and more, was a “no-brainer.”
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Brodeur-Urbas said he had previously planned to “build a 10-person billion-dollar company,” but a surge in demand from enterprise customers forced him to build a dedicated sales force and expand his engineering team.
Gumloop isn’t alone in the race to turn every knowledge worker into an AI agent builder. The startup faces stiff competition from established automation platforms like Zapier and n8n, as well as specialized agent builders like Dust. Even basic AI labs are entering the fray. For example, Anthropic’s Claude Co-Work allows users to create autonomous agents without writing a single line of code.
But Randle believes Gumloop is better than all its rivals. During due diligence, the company discovered that at least one of its customers had some level of natural adoption of Gumloop.
When Randle asked the CTO how he chose Gumloop, his answer spoke for itself. The company, like two of its competitors, gave its employees full access to Gumloop. After 6 months, the results were clear. Staff used Gumloop daily or weekly, but competing tools remained untouched, Randle told TechCrunch.
According to Randle, the reason Gumloop has gained so much traction is because the learning curve is minimal. “You can start automating agents and workflows right away,” he said.
While many AI startups worry that basic models will duplicate the same functionality and become obsolete, Randle believes 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 for a particular task. Therefore, Gumloop gives you the flexibility to choose the best model for the job at any time.
Randle says another reason model independence is attractive is cost. “A lot of companies have credits for OpenAI, Gemini and Anthropic, and they want to use them all,” he said.
His excitement about the company ultimately comes down to the size of the opportunity.
“Enterprise automation is a huge goldmine,” Randle said. “I think this is the biggest category of enterprise AI.”
