Gumloop Raises $50M from Benchmark to Scale AI Agents

Welcome to the podcast.

I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer.

Today on the show, we are talking about,

I want to do a startup highlight.

It's a company called Gumloop.

They just raised $50 million from benchmark,

one of the top tier VCs.

And essentially, their goal is to help every employee

turn into an AI agent builder.

So look at those tasks you're doing,

look at the things you're doing,

and how do we create AI agents to automate stuff you're doing?

Share those to other organizations,

share them within your department around your company

to help everyone do more with AI agents.

And honestly, this is a pretty ambitious company,

but I think they've actually landed

some pretty successful plays.

I'm excited to get into this

because it's a company that was started in mid-2023, right?

So we're talking like post-chat UBT hype,

and they were able to grow scale successfully,

and now they've raised $50 million.

So this is gonna be a good one to get into.

Before we get into that,

I just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone.

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Thank you, Texas St.

for saying I am a generally good guy.

I hope someday to become like a super good guy,

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you probably see this on a lot of other podcasts too,

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Matthew, come on bro, is my birthday.

You gotta give me a four star review like that.

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All right, let's get into what's going on with Gumloop.

This is a really interesting company.

It was started by Max Broder Urbass.

He's one of the co-founders.

And they started back in 2023

and I kind of gave you the idea

the overview of what they're trying to do,

but basically they're just trying to help automate

some of the more tedious parts of a job with AI.

When they first launched, I think it was very ambitious

and it was definitely a lot more experimental.

And I remember seeing this company come out of the gate.

It's something that was ambitious,

but I didn't really know if they're going to be able to pull this off.

I think that has changed a lot.

I've been impressed at the time back then.

There's actually a bunch of other companies

that were doing demos and stuff

and some of them did not make it.

But Gumloop has done a pretty good job.

They're used by Shopify, Ramp, Gusto, Instacart, OpenDore.

A bunch of other of these big players

are actually using them.

And they essentially deploy AI agents

that are doing complex stuff, multi-step workflows,

and you don't need an engineer.

So instead of having to write the code,

you can just build these agents visually,

similar to what I'm working on with AIbox.ai, my own startup.

And so yeah, no shocker that Gumloop is doing really well.

I see a ton of value.

And this is an area that is growing very fast

as I'm seeing with my own startup.

So according to Broder Urbass,

because essentially what happens,

like what he says happens inside of a company

and why they grew so fast,

he says that someone is going to build

like one of the employees inside of a company builds one,

and then another team inside of the organization

is going to like copy it and they modify it.

And then basically it just spreads like wildfire

inside of the organization.

So it's kind of interesting, right?

I think you oftentimes hear people creating a tool

and then it kind of gets out of the organization

and another organization uses it or a template

or some sort of resource.

And that's how a lot of these companies grow.

It's interesting to see that for them,

it's like one person in a company uses it.

And they basically are kind of the person

that spreads it to the whole organization.

He said that once someone like this

starts building more agents,

then suddenly the whole company becomes AI-native.

That's a quote from him.

So I think right now,

that vision of putting AI into the hands of every employee

is what they're trying to do.

And that's what Drew Benchmark's general partner,

Everett Randall, to them.

He's the one that kind of spearheaded

the investment into them.

Randall also is new to Benchmark.

He joined it just in October.

He was at Kleiner Parkins before.

So Randall's been at a lot of these top DCs.

And he believes that everyday workers

should have a quote unquote AI superpower.

So at this kind of, I think why they made

this investment here.

And of course, $50 million is a big lead.

I mean, they didn't put the full $50 million in,

but they led this around.

It's their Series B investment.

And this is also Randall's first deal over at Benchmark.

So he's making his mark and this is a cool,

this is an impressive deal.

The round had a bunch of other people in it.

There was Nexus Venture Partners,

first round capital, light combinator, box group,

and the Canon project and Shopify.

So it's interesting because Shopify is one of the customers

that uses it and now they're invested.

And I think we actually see this a lot with software,

especially with these bigger firms.

If they can go find a startup and they're willing

to use the product, they like the product

and probably they're seeing a lot of internally

at the company, it's saving them a lot of time and money

and their employees are using it.

They're like, well, that's probably gonna be the case

for a lot of other companies.

And I've actually seen some investors,

it's kind of their like a sort of strategy

to invest in their, invest in their like expense sheet,

basically the companies that they spend money on,

they invest in them.

So one thing that I think is interesting,

Gumloop wasn't actually actively raising money,

but Broder said that, you know, the timing felt right

and Benchmark kind of reached out to them

and said, hey, look, we see you guys are growing,

we'd be interested in helping you put together around.

And Benchmark, by the way, is the company,

I mean, obviously tier one VC,

but they've invested in like eBay Uber Dropbox.

So they've been into a lot of these.

And so I think because of that Broder

who's leading Gumloop was like, look,

this is a big, you know, big firm,

they obviously have a lot of great connections.

And so he wanted to get in with it.

Originally, his goal when he was building this company,

though Broder, he said that he was envisioning

building just a 10 person billion dollar company.

That was his goal.

He just wanted this to be like super lean.

And you know, with AI agents and especially

because his company is an AI agent company,

I think that would have been some incredible marketing

to be like, look, we reached a billion dollar valuation.

And we've just done the whole thing with just 10 people

and we've been using AI agents.

There's an interesting report that came out,

it's kind of one viral yesterday on X,

which is that for like getting anthropic up

to like over a billion dollar valuation,

there was only one person on the go-to-market strategy team

and he was just using.

And I actually think up until quite recently,

it was one guy running all of their GDM

and he was just using tons of agents

powered by Claude to do everything.

And so I'm sure that's kind of like a marketing thing,

but I think the guy leaked that out himself.

It wasn't like anthropic, it was trying to make a big point of it.

So I thought that was hilarious.

It's definitely possible more than you'd think.

But of course, according to Broder, in the case of Gumloop,

he said demand from enterprise customers,

basically pushed them to scale more aggressively,

so that they'd add a lot of engineers

and a dedicated sales team,

which makes sense, right?

And I know it's like, well, why can't the AI do the sales?

And realistically, people usually want to talk to a person

on a call and not be sold by an AI agent

that you can't really verify and put a face to.

Gumloop definitely isn't alone, though,

and I think chasing this kind of vision

of turning knowledge workers into AI builders.

There's a lot of competition, Zapier, N8N.

There's some newer interesting agent tools

that I've been looking at like dust.

And of course, I'm building one AI box.

And so I think, basically, even the major AI companies

are moving in this direction.

Anthropic recently introduced Cloud Co-Work,

which basically lets you create autonomous agents

without writing any sort of code.

And like, JGPT is custom GPTs,

which I wouldn't go so far as call those agents,

but they are useful tools that can help you

kind of automate some things to a small degree.

Now, one thing that I think Gumloop is doing very well,

and I predict this as a huge trend across all AI companies

is that they are modeling agnostic by design.

So basically, every time there's a new update

and a new model starts to kind of crush it

in the benchmarks and beating everybody else.

I mean, typically, we see kind of like a cyclical loop

somewhere between like, chat GPT and Claude and Gemini

and Grock and maybe another random one

gets thrown in the mix every once in a while,

but we see this like every quarter basically

cycling through who's leading in the benchmarks.

And so because of that, different AI models

are good at different tasks.

They perform differently.

Gumloop basically lets companies choose whatever model fits

their job best at the moment

and they can switch that out.

I think this is actually smart

and it's kind of a competitive advantage

that opening AI Google Anthropic,

they can't really touch because even though

they're all gonna make these AI agent tools,

if you could get the same thing at a company

that lets you switch and interchange between them all,

there's a huge value there as different AI models

are kind of going up and down in the benchmarks

and they're getting, you know,

they're edging out the competitors.

You always wanna use the best tool

and some of them are better for different things.

And to that point, if you wanna get access

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Catch you guys in the next episode.