Gumloop raises $50M from Benchmark to help employees build AI agents without coding

When Max Brodeur-Urbas co-founded Gumloop in mid-2023, his goal was to help non-technical employees use AI to automate repetitive work. At the time, the idea of AI agents was still mostly experimental and often unreliable.

As the underlying AI technology has improved, Gumloop says its product has evolved accordingly.

The company says it now enables teams at organisations such as Shopify, Ramp, Gusto, Samsara, Instacart, and Opendoor to deploy dependable AI agents that can independently handle complex, multistep tasks, all without requiring help from an engineer.

Employees can also share the agents they create with coworkers, creating a compounding effect that accelerates automation across the organisation. “They get addicted, they start building more agents, and then all of a sudden, the whole company is AI native,” Brodeur-Urbas said.

As businesses move quickly to adopt AI, Benchmark general partner Everett Randle believes success will depend on equipping every employee with AI-powered capabilities, and he sees Gumloop’s easy-to-use agent builder as the tool that can unlock that opportunity.

That is why Randle, who joined Benchmark last October from Kleiner Perkins, decided to lead a $50 million Series B investment in Gumloop. The round, which marks Randle’s first deal at Benchmark, also included participation from Nexus VP, First Round Capital, Y Combinator, BoxGroup, The Cannon Project, and Shopify.

Although Gumloop was not actively trying to raise more money, the startup decided that this was the right moment to “step on the gas.” For Brodeur-Urbas, partnering with Benchmark — the firm behind companies such as eBay, Uber, and Dropbox — was a “no-brainer.”

While Brodeur-Urbas had previously envisioned building a “10-person, billion-dollar company,” he said that strong demand from enterprise customers has prompted him to build a dedicated sales team and expand Gumloop’s engineering organisation.

Gumloop is far from the only company trying to turn knowledge workers into AI agent builders. The startup faces intense competition from established automation platforms such as Zapier and n8n, as well as more specialised agent-building tools like Dust. Even foundational AI labs are moving into the space. For example, Anthropic’s Claude Cowork allows users to create autonomous agents without writing any code.

Even so, Randle believes Gumloop stands apart from its competitors. During his due diligence, he found that at least one customer had adopted Gumloop in a somewhat organic way.

When Randle asked a CTO how the company had selected Gumloop, the answer stood out. The business had given employees access to Gumloop along with two rival tools. Six months later, staff were using Gumloop daily or weekly, while the competing products were largely ignored, Randle said.

According to Randle, Gumloop gained traction because it has a very short learning curve. “You can go in and start making agents and workflow automations immediately,” he said.

While many AI startups worry that foundational model providers will eventually copy their functionality and render them irrelevant, Randle believes Gumloop’s model-agnostic strategy is exactly what will continue to draw in customers.

As AI models continue to evolve, one model may outperform another on a particular task. Gumloop, in turn, gives users the flexibility to pick whichever model is best for the job at that moment.

Randle said another reason that model independence appeals to customers is cost. “Plenty of enterprises have OpenAI, Gemini, and Anthropic credits. They want to use all of them,” he said.

In the end, his enthusiasm for Gumloop comes down to the scale of the market opportunity. “Enterprise automation is a massive pot of gold,” Randle said. “I think it’s the biggest category in enterprise AI.”