Gumloop Secures $50M from Benchmark to Empower Employees as AI Agent Builders

When Max Brodeur-Urbas co-founded Gumloop in mid-2023, his goal was to empower non-technical employees to automate repetitive work with AI. Back then, AI agents were still a nascent and often unreliable concept.

As AI has advanced, so too has Gumloop's platform.

The company now enables teams at organizations like Shopify, Ramp, Gusto, Samsara, Instacart, and Opendoor to deploy dependable AI agents. These agents autonomously manage intricate, multi-step processes without requiring any engineering support.

Employees can share the agents they create with coworkers, generating a compounding effect that speeds up internal automation. "They get hooked, they build more agents, and suddenly, the entire company operates with AI at its core," Brodeur-Urbas explained to TechCrunch.

In the race to adopt AI, Benchmark general partner Everett Randle believes true success comes from equipping every employee with AI capabilities. He sees Gumloop's intuitive agent-building platform as a prime example of the tool that can unlock this potential.

This conviction led Randle, who joined Benchmark from Kleiner Perkins last October, to spearhead a $50 million Series B investment in Gumloop. This marks his first deal at his new firm, with participation from Nexus VP, First Round Capital, Y Combinator, Box Group, The Cannon Project, and Shopify.

Although Gumloop wasn't actively fundraising, the startup decided now was the right time to accelerate growth. For Brodeur-Urbas, partnering with Benchmark—the firm behind giants like eBay, Uber, and Dropbox—was an obvious choice.

Brodeur-Urbas once aimed to build a lean, high-value company. However, soaring demand from enterprise clients has pushed him to expand, building out a dedicated sales team and scaling the engineering department.

Gumloop isn't alone in trying to turn every knowledge worker into an AI agent builder. It competes with established automation platforms like Zapier and n8n, specialized rivals like Dust, and even foundational AI labs. For example, Anthropic's Claude Co-Work also lets users build autonomous agents without coding.

Yet Randle is convinced Gumloop outperforms its competition. His due diligence revealed that at least one customer adopted the platform organically.

When Randle asked a client CTO how they selected Gumloop, the answer was revealing. The company had given employees full access to Gumloop and two competing tools. After six months, the result was clear: staff used Gumloop daily or weekly, while the other tools gathered dust.

According to Randle, Gumloop's rapid adoption stems from its ease of use. "You can jump in and immediately start creating agents and automating workflows," he noted.

While many AI startups fear being made obsolete by advancing foundational models, Randle believes Gumloop's model-agnostic approach is a key strength that will continue to attract customers.

As AI models evolve, different ones may excel at specific tasks. Gumloop provides the flexibility to select the best model for the job at any moment.

Randle points out that model independence is also attractive for cost reasons. "Many enterprises have credits with OpenAI, Gemini, and Anthropic. They want the ability to use them all," he said.

His enthusiasm for the company ultimately hinges on the vast scale of the opportunity.

"Enterprise automation is a massive, untapped market," Randle stated. "I believe it's the largest category within enterprise AI."