Vancouver-based Gumloop, which offers a no-code platform to automate workflows with artificial intelligence (AI), has secured a $3.1-million USD ($4.28-million CAD) seed round.
Gumloop is now looking to grow its team but “stay lean.”
The all-equity round was led by San Francisco venture capital firm First Round Capital with participation from Y Combinator and a variety of angel investors, including Instacart co-founder Max Mullen, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, and WePay co-founder Richard Aberman.
Gumloop was founded in April 2023 by McGill University classmates Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal under the name AgentHub. The Gumloop team currently only consists of Brodeur-Urbas, Behal, and an intern. Brodeur-Urbas had previously worked at Microsoft, while Behal previously worked as a machine learning engineer at Amazon. Brodeur-Urbas told BetaKit that Gumloop has raised around $3.4 million to date.
As AgentHub, Gumloop went on to join Silicon Valley-based accelerator Y Combinator and participated as one of the few Canadian companies at its Winter 2024 demo day. Demo day allows the more than 200 participating companies from around the world to pitch ideas to a group of investors and media. The company changed its name this past May to, among other reasons, sound more accessible to non-developers.
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The platform started as a side project for a small group of users in a Discord community looking to use AI to automate mundane digital tasks. Gumloop’s earliest version was a “simple UI wrapper” around an autonomous agent framework called AutoGPT before the company started work on its own automation framework, according to its company handbook.
Gumloop users can automate workflows by connecting relevant integrations like Google Sheets, Slack, YouTube, websites, emails, and more, then providing instructions for what data or information needs to be taken from one and integrated into another. For example, users can ask Gumloop to identify PDFs in an email inbox and extract invoice information into a Google Sheet. Gumloop also provides a number of workflow templates, such as for meeting preparation or converting the transcript of a YouTube video into a blog post.
Following this funding, Gumloop is now looking to grow its team but “stay lean,” Brodeur-Urbas said in a statement. In its company handbook, Gumloop said it hopes to be a team of four by the end of the year. Brodeur-Urbas told BetaKit that Gumloop wants to “be an integral part of 1000 businesses within the next year.”
UPDATE (07/24/2024): A previous version of this story incorrectly stated Max Brodeur-Urbas had previously worked at Oculus. Brodeur-Urbas clarified to BetaKit that he only built VR games on the Oculus store for fun. This story has also been updated with further information about Gumloop and the seed round provided by Brodeur-Urbas.
Feature image courtesy Y Combinator.
