Gumloop: The Vancouver-Born Startup Simplifying Task Automation with Drag-and-Drop Tools
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Amelia Cross
- January 10, 2025
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Gumloop: From a Vancouver Bedroom to AI-Powered Task Automation
Developers Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal founded Gumloop to address a key challenge in AI-powered automation: reliability. While many tools promise to handle complex business tasks, they often fall short due to high costs and unrealistic user expectations, says Brodeur-Urbas.
“If users want to use AI for enterprise purposes, it must have no margin for error,” he told TechCrunch. “Leaving specific workflows entirely to AI isn’t realistic. Users would end up paying for [an AI] to repeat the same Google search endlessly.”
Seeing the potential for narrower, targeted AI applications, Brodeur-Urbas, a former Microsoft software engineer, and Behal, previously with Amazon Web Services, developed Gumloop. The startup began as a proof-of-concept built on the open-source app Auto-GPT and grew into a fully-fledged platform for automating repetitive workflows with AI.
Launched from a bedroom in Vancouver, Gumloop offers a drag-and-drop workflow builder that integrates with tools like GitHub, Gmail, Outlook, and X. Users can create custom automations by assembling modular components or choose prebuilt workflows for tasks such as generating stock reports or summarizing documents.
“What started as a side project for nontechnical users in a Discord server has grown into something much larger than we ever expected,” said Brodeur-Urbas. Gumloop now aims to bring “real value” to businesses by streamlining everyday tasks with AI.
Gumloop Secures $17M Series A to Expand AI-Powered Workflow Automation
Gumloop, the Vancouver-born startup, is gaining traction among major players like Instacart and Rippling, according to co-founder Max Brodeur-Urbas. The platform enables nontechnical users to automate workflows without relying on engineers, a feature that has driven its rapid adoption.
“Today, thousands of users rely on Gumloop as a core tool for their business,” Brodeur-Urbas said. “Giving nontechnical people the tools to solve their own problems is where we found market pull.”
Despite competition from automation platforms like Parabola, Tines, Induced AI, and Nanonets—as well as emerging agentic tools from companies like OpenAI—Gumloop is carving out its niche. The startup plans to stay agile by maintaining a small team, capped at 10 people.
“Using AI to code gives us the throughput of a 20-person team,” Brodeur-Urbas claimed. “Our goal is to be a 10-person, billion-dollar company.”
Gumloop recently raised $17 million in a Series A round led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from First Round Capital, Y Combinator, and angel investors such as Instacart co-founder Max Mullen and Databricks co-founder Reynold Xin. The round brings Gumloop’s total funding to $20 million.
While preparing to relocate from Vancouver to San Francisco, Brodeur-Urbas emphasized that raising capital wasn’t the company’s priority. “We didn’t need the money at all,” he said. “Raising money isn’t the goal—building a product people love is. This funding will help us scale that product even faster.”
