Gumloop Raises $50M from Benchmark to Scale AI Agents

**Jaden Schaefer** (0:00)
Welcome to the podcast, I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Today on the show, we're talking about, I wanna do a startup highlight. It's a company called Gumloop. They just raised $50 million from Benchmark, one of the top tier VCs. And they're, essentially their goal is to help every employee turn into an AI agent builder. So look at the 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 and 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 this is a company that was started in mid 2023, right? So we're talking like post-Chat GPT hype, and they were able to grow, scale successfully, and now they've raised $50 million. So this is going to be a good one to get into. Before we get into that, I just want to say a big thank you to everyone.
Yesterday was my birthday, and I ask everyone if you hadn't already to leave a review for my birthday. And I wanted to say a huge thank you. I had tons of reviews. I wanted to read a couple of them. Some of them are funny. Someone said, I think Jaden does a great job of concisely capturing the latest AI-oriented news. He comes across as a generally good guy, and I always look forward to his take on things. That is from Texa Saint. Thank you, Texa Saint, for saying I am a generally good guy. I hope someday to become like a super good guy, but a generally good guy is awesome. I think especially in the field of politics, you probably see this on a lot of other podcasts too, but in the field of AI, there's so much that touches into politics and ethics and so many areas where people have a lot of strong opinions. So inevitably, I'm going to say things that probably people don't agree with for a variety of different reasons other people agree with. So anyways, I hope that it's still insightful and educational, and we're all learning about AI together. So I appreciate all of you guys coming along.
One other, I got a four-star review from Matthew C Coder. Matthew, come on, bro, it's my birthday. You gotta give me a four-star review like that. This is what he said. He said, provides a good overview of recent news in AI, but can be very subjective and repetitive in some topics and comes across as biased for certain vendors. As far as being repetitive, it's kind of hard, right? Cause you have like Google and OpenAI and Anthropic, and they all kind of come up with features. And when someone does one feature, they also copy it. So I totally get that, how it can feel repetitive sometimes. Also, as far as being biased to certain vendors, I will say not sponsored by any of the companies I talk about on the podcast currently, although shout out to OpenAI, I won't turn down a sponsorship deal. But in all seriousness, as far as being biased to certain vendors, I definitely, I can agree with that, I probably am, but it's typically vendors that I use the most and that I get the most use out of. So I mean, naturally I'm going to be biased if I'm actively using them. And I do try to try all of the different AI companies. And so if, you know, I'm just seeing the, you know, XYZ video generator, like VO3 from Google Flow is just so much better than something like Runway, for example, I am going to be biased and that's kind of what I'm doing. But I do try to re-evaluate because these things all change all the time and give you guys the latest on on whatever's improving the most. So anyways, that's where I'm at on all those. I really appreciate it. If you have any comments or thoughts, feel free to share them, write a review. I'll probably cover it in the show if it's an interesting thing that I feel like applies to everyone. All right, let's get into what's going on with Gumloop. This is a really interesting company. It was started by Max Broder-Urbes. 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 their 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 was 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, Open Door. 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 AI Box.AI, my own startup. And I, 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 Erbass, 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 like 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.