When Max Brodeur-Urbas helped launch Gumloop in mid-2023, his goal was to enable employees without technical backgrounds to automate routine work using artificial intelligence. At that stage, AI agent technology was still emerging and often unreliable. As AI capabilities have advanced, Gumloop’s platform has evolved alongside them. The company now states that teams at organizations such as Shopify, Ramp, Gusto, Samsara, Instacart, and Opendoor can implement dependable AI agents to manage intricate, multi-step processes independently, completely without engineering support. Workers can share the agents they create with coworkers, generating a compounding effect that speeds up internal automation efforts.

As businesses hurry to integrate AI, Benchmark general partner Everett Randle argues that true success depends on equipping every employee with AI tools. He sees Gumloop’s user-friendly agent-building platform as exactly the type of solution that can realize that potential. This belief led Randle—who moved to Benchmark from Kleiner Perkins last October—to head a $50 million Series B investment in Gumloop. This deal, his first with his new firm, saw involvement from Nexus VP, First Round Capital, Y Combinator, Box Group, The Cannon Project, and Shopify. Although Gumloop wasn’t actively fundraising, the startup concluded that now was the right time to accelerate growth. For Brodeur-Urbas, aligning with Benchmark—known for backing iconic companies like eBay, Uber, and Dropbox—was an obvious choice.

While Brodeur-Urbas once aimed to “build a 10-person, billion-dollar company,” rising demand from corporate clients has pushed him to expand, including building a dedicated sales team and growing the engineering department. Gumloop is certainly not alone in trying to transform every knowledge worker into an AI agent creator. The startup competes with established automation platforms like Zapier and n8n, as well as specialized agent-building tools such as Dust. Even core AI research companies are joining the space; for example, Anthropic’s Claude Co-Work lets users develop autonomous agents without coding.

Nevertheless, Randle considers Gumloop to stand above its competitors. During his evaluation, he learned that at least one client had adopted Gumloop in a notably organic way. When Randle asked a CTO how they selected the platform, the answer was revealing. The company had provided employees with full access to Gumloop and two rival products. According to Randle, Gumloop gained traction because of its exceptionally low learning curve. “You can go in and start making agents and workflow automations immediately,” he explained.

While many AI startups fear that advancing foundation models might duplicate their features and make them redundant, Randle is confident that Gumloop’s model-agnostic strategy will continue to draw customers. As AI models improve, one might outperform another for a specific task. Gumloop offers the flexibility to select the most suitable model for any given situation. Randle also notes that model independence is appealing for cost reasons. “Plenty of enterprises have OpenAI, Gemini, and Anthropic credits. They want to use all of them,” he said.

Ultimately, his enthusiasm for the company stems from the vast scale of the opportunity. “Enterprise automation is a massive pot of gold,” Randle stated. “I think it’s the biggest category in enterprise AI.”