When Max Brodeur-Urbas co-founded Gumloop in mid-2023, his vision was to help non-technical employees automate repetitive tasks using AI. At that time, the concept of AI agents was still largely experimental and prone to errors.

As AI technology has matured, so has Gumloop’s offering.

The company claims that it now allows teams at organizations like Shopify, Ramp, Gusto, Samsara, Instacart, and Opendoor to deploy reliable AI agents that autonomously handle complex, multistep tasks, all without ever needing an engineer.

Employees can share the agents they build with colleagues, creating a compounding effect that accelerates internal automation. “They get addicted, they start building more agents, and then all of a sudden, the whole company is AI native,” Brodeur-Urbas told TechCrunch.

As companies race to adopt AI, Benchmark general partner Everett Randle believes the key to success lies in empowering every worker with AI superpowers, and Gumloop’s intuitive agent builder is an example of the kind of tool that will unlock that potential.

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

Though Gumloop wasn’t actively seeking new capital, the startup decided this was the year to “step on the gas.” For Brodeur-Urbas, partnering with Benchmark — the firm behind icons like eBay, Uber, and Dropbox — was a “no-brainer.”

While Brodeur-Urbas previously planned to “build a 10-person, billion-dollar company,” the surging demand from enterprise clients has compelled him to build a dedicated sales force and scale up his engineering team, he said.

Gumloop is by no means the only player vying to turn every knowledge worker into an AI agent-builder. The startup faces stiff competition from established automation platforms like Zapier and n8n, as well as specialized agent builders like Dust. Even foundational AI labs are entering the fray.  For instance, Anthropic’s Claude Cowork allows users to create autonomous agents without writing a single line of code.

But Randle believes Gumloop is superior to all its rivals. During his due diligence, he discovered that at least one of the company’s customers had adopted Gumloop somewhat organically.

When Randle asked a CTO how they chose Gumloop, the response was telling. The company had given employees full access to Gumloop alongside two competitors. Six months later, the results were clear: Staff were using Gumloop daily or weekly, while the competing tools sat untouched, Randle told TechCrunch.

The reason Gumloop gained such momentum, according to Randle, is its minimal learning curve. “You can go in and start making agents and workflow automations immediately,” he said.

While many AI startups worry that foundational models will replicate the same functionality and render them obsolete, Randle is convinced that Gumloop’s model-agnostic approach is precisely what will keep attracting customers.

As models continue to evolve, one may perform better than another for a specific task. So, Gumloop provides the flexibility to choose the model best suited for the job at any given moment.

Another reason why model independence is attractive, according to Randle, is cost. “Plenty of enterprises have OpenAI, Gemini, and Anthropic credits. They want to use all of them,” he said.

His excitement for the company ultimately comes down to the sheer size of the opportunity.

“Enterprise automation is a massive pot of gold,” Randle said. “I think it’s the biggest category in enterprise AI.”

An unidentified foreign hacker broke into the FBI’s field office in New York in 2023 and compromised files related to the bureau’s investigation into the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to Reuters.

The newswire cited a source familiar with the breach, as well as court documents, and reported that the hack took advantage of a server at the Child Exploitation Forensic Lab in the FBI’s New York field office that was inadvertently left vulnerable by an FBI special agent working on the case. The breach “included combing through certain files pertaining to the Epstein investigation,” according to a court document. 

An FBI spokesperson said that the investigation is ongoing. “Following the 2023 cyber incident, the FBI contained the affected network and determined the incident to be an isolated one. The FBI restricted access to the malicious actor and rectified the network,” the spokesperson said in a statement sent by email to TechCrunch.

A source told Reuters that the hacker did not realize they had broken into the FBI until the agents asked them to join a video call where they showed their credentials to the hacker.

For years, venture capitalists have been skeptical of beverage startups, citing thin margins and brutal distribution as reasons most brands never break out. But a new wave of “functional soda” companies has been challenging that assumption, including Poppi, the prebiotic soda brand that grew from a kitchen experiment into a $1.95 billion acquisition by PepsiCo. 

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, is joined by Poppi co-founder Allison Ellsworth to talk about building a beverage startup in a venture world dominated by SaaS and AI. From pitching on Shark Tank while nine months pregnant to going viral on TikTok and buying a last-minute Super Bowl ad, Ellsworth breaks down what it really takes to build a category-defining consumer brand — and what she looks for now that she’s back on Shark Tank as an investor herself.

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