Vancouver-founded Gumloop has raised a $17-million USD ($24.5 million CAD) Series A round as it looks to hire talent for its new San Francisco home.
The company, which develops an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered workflow automation platform, raised the all-equity round from round leader Nexus Venture Partners with participation from return investors First Round Capital and Y Combinator. Gumloop co-founder and CEO Max Brodeur-Urbas told BetaKit in an interview that Nexus Venture Partners is gaining a board seat as a result of the round.
Max Brodeur-Urbas
“It’s just too easy for someone who’s exceptional to get paid three times the amount in California and move down.”
Gumloop
Brodeur-Urbas said Gumloop was looking for investors who were previous founders that could provide advice on scaling, which the company got in the form of a number of angel investors. These include Instacart co-founder Max Mullen, Databricks co-founder Reynold Xin, Webflow co-founder Bryant Chou, and My First Million podcast founder Shaan Puri.
While he said Gumloop didn’t necessarily need the money, Brodeur-Urbas explained the company wants to move quickly and focus on its product without any external concerns, which it can definitely do now with this capital in hand.
“If we’re trying to be such a talent-dense team, it’s much easier to convince great people to join if it’s derisked pretty heavily,” Brodeur-Urbas said.
Gumloop was founded in April 2023 by McGill University classmates Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal under the name AgentHub. The company changed its name last May to, among other reasons, sound more accessible to non-developers. Soon after, it closed a $3.1-million USD ($4.28-million CAD) seed round in July. The company has raised a total of $20 million USD to date.
Initially a side project for a small group of users on the messaging platform Discord looking to automate mundane digital tasks, Gumloop works by connecting relevant integrations like Google Sheets, Slack, YouTube, websites, emails, and more into a drag-and-drop style, no-code interface. Users can provide the platform instructions for what data needs to be taken from one and integrated into another, such as identifying PDFs in an email inbox and extracting invoice information into a Google Sheet.
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The Gumloop team currently only consists of Brodeur-Urbas, Behal, and one employee who will be relocating to San Francisco with them as they target hiring new talent that Brodeur-Urbas believes can be found in the Valley.
“It feels like San Francisco is a very strong magnet for exceptional talent, and Vancouver suffers from being too close to that magnet,” Brodeur-Urbas said. “It’s just too easy for someone who’s exceptional to get paid three times the amount in California and move down, and then they’re just based there.”
It helps that, as AgentHub, Gumloop was one of the few Canadian companies that participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 demo day, allowing the young founders to build out their network in the Silicon Valley area.
While he doesn’t have a roadmap or timeline, Brodeur-Urbas has set a goal for Gumloop to hit a $1-billion valuation with a “soft” cap of ten employees. Since the company technically raised a Series A round with just two people, he thinks the company can grow even larger if the team is multiplied by a factor of five.
Feature image courtesy Y Combinator.