Gumloop, a startup founded by former Microsoft and Amazon Web Services engineers, has raised $17 million in Series A funding to further develop its AI-powered workflow automation platform. The company's founders, Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal, believe that AI has the potential to automate a wide range of business-relevant tasks, but that many current AI-powered automation tools are unreliable and costly.

Brodeur-Urbas, an ex-Microsoft software engineer, told TechCrunch that users often expect too much from AI, assuming it can handle highly specialized, niche workloads with precision. However, he emphasized that AI technology needs to have zero margin for error to be viable for enterprise purposes. Instead, Brodeur-Urbas and Behal focused on finding narrower applications for AI that could provide real value.

Their idea eventually became a wrapper for the open-source app Auto-GPT, which then evolved into a proof-of-concept and eventually the startup, Gumloop. Gumloop's platform automates repetitive workflows using AI, aiming to streamline basic tasks. The company's workflow builder integrates with third-party apps and tools, including GitHub, Gmail, Outlook, and X, allowing users to drag modular components onto a canvas to build automations or choose from prebuilt pipelines for tasks like generating daily stock reports and summarizing documents.

According to Brodeur-Urbas, teams at Instacart and Rippling are already using Gumloop for various use cases, with thousands of users relying on the platform as a core tool for their business. The company's goal is to give non-technical people the tools to solve their own problems without relying on engineers, which is where they found market pull.

While there are many workflow automation tools available, including Parabola, Tines, Induced AI, and Nanonets, Gumloop plans to remain nimble by keeping its team small, with a cap of 10 people. Brodeur-Urbas claims that using AI to code has allowed them to have the throughput of a 20-person team, outpacing competitors. The company's ambitious goal is to become a 10-person, billion-dollar company.

The $17 million Series A round was led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from First Round Capital, Y Combinator, and angel investors including Instacart co-founder Max Mullen and Databricks co-founder and chief architect Reynold Xin. Gumloop has raised a total of $20 million in capital to date.

Brodeur-Urbas emphasized that the company didn't need the funding, but rather chose to raise capital to accelerate the development and scaling of their product. "Raising money isn't the goal – building a product people love is," he said. With this new funding, Gumloop is poised to further expand its platform and reach more users.

As the company prepares to relocate from Vancouver to San Francisco, it will be interesting to see how Gumloop's AI-powered workflow automation platform continues to evolve and impact the business landscape.