Tech
Gushwork bets on AI search for customer leads — and early results are emerging
As AI-powered search tools reshape how businesses are discovered online, India-founded startup Gushwork is helping companies capture customers from platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity — with early traction that is beginning to draw investor support.
The two-year-old startup said Thursday it had raised $9 million in a seed round led by Susquehanna International Group (SIG) and Lightspeed, with participation from B Capital, Seaborne Capital, Beenext, Sparrow Capital, and 2.2 Capital. The round values Gushwork at $33 million post-money, up from about $7.5 million following its Lightspeed-led $2.1 million pre-seed in July 2023, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The latest financing brings Gushwork’s total funding to $11 million, the startup said.
The funding comes as AI companies, including OpenAI and Perplexity, begin to chip away at traditional web search, prompting incumbents like Google to roll out AI-generated overviews and other conversational features across their search products. Gushwork is betting this shift will create a new opportunity to help businesses surface in AI-driven discovery channels using its automated marketing agents.
Founded in 2023 by Nayrhit Bhattacharya (pictured above, right) and Adithya Venkatesh (pictured above, left), Gushwork initially focused on helping small and medium businesses outsource workflows using a mix of AI and human expertise. The startup began narrowing its focus toward search-led marketing after seeing strong customer demand for help with improving online visibility.
“When we started, we were focused on helping businesses outsource faster and outsource better,” Bhattacharya told TechCrunch in an interview, adding that the pull around search from customers became increasingly hard to ignore.
Gushwork’s platform uses a network of AI agents to automatically generate and update search-optimized content; build backlinks — typically 10 to 20 per customer — through a network of roughly 200 to 300 partner websites; and track inbound leads through an integrated content management system. The goal, Bhattacharya said, is to help businesses surface in both traditional search results and AI-generated answers without relying on large in-house marketing teams.
The startup says it has signed up more than 300 paying customers — roughly 95% of them in the U.S. — with subscriptions starting at $800 per month. Gushwork is currently running at about $1.5 million in annualized recurring revenue after rolling out its AI search-focused product around three months ago and is targeting $3 million to $3.5 million ARR in the next three months, Bhattacharya said, adding that the startup is growing about 50% to 80% month over month.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 9, 2026
Across Gushwork’s customer base, about 20% of website traffic now comes from AI-driven search and chat platforms, but those sources account for around 40% of inbound leads, Bhattacharya said, citing the startup’s internal data.
The higher-intent leads, Bhattacharya said, are already translating into business outcomes for some customers. In one case, a professional services client has closed between $200,000 and $350,000 worth of contracts after adopting the platform, he said, declining to disclose the customer’s name. He added that many users are seeing meaningful pipeline growth as AI-driven discovery gains traction.
Gushwork’s customer base today is concentrated among high-ticket B2B service providers, industrial distributors, and contract manufacturers, primarily in the U.S., Bhattacharya said. The startup’s average subscription runs about $800 to $900 per month, or roughly $9,000 to $10,000 in annual contract value, he added.
The shift toward AI-driven discovery is still in its early stages but is gaining momentum. Tools such as generative AI chatbots and AI web browsers are increasingly being used by buyers to research vendors and products. OpenAI said in July 2025 that ChatGPT received about 2.5 billion prompts a day globally, including roughly 330 million from U.S. users. Bhattacharya said the trend is beginning to reshape how some businesses approach online visibility.
Gushwork plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering team, improve model accuracy, and scale its go-to-market efforts, Bhattacharya said. He added that the startup has more than 800 businesses on its waitlist that it plans to begin onboarding.
The startup, headquartered in Delaware with an office in Bengaluru, has about 70 employees in India, along with several contractors.
Tech
Revolut eyes valuation of up to $200B in eventual IPO
British neobank Revolut seems to be eyeing a major valuation bump when it eventually goes public. The company is targeting a market cap between $150 billion and $200 billion in an initial public offering, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous investor sources.
The fintech giant, which secured a full banking license in the United Kingdom in March after years of waiting, was most recently valued at $75 billion, up from $45 billion in 2024, in a secondary share sale that made it one of Europe’s most valuable private tech companies.
Revolut’s co-founder and CEO, Nik Storonsky, last week said that the company’s IPO was at least “two years away,” according to Bloomberg.
According to PitchBook and the Financial Times, the company is working on another secondary share sale, scheduled for the second half of 2026, that would value it at more than $100 billion.
As of November 2025, the company had raised a total of $5.89 billion, according to PitchBook. Revolut reported revenue of $6 billion in the financial year ended December 31, 2025, up from $4 billion in 2024. The company’s net profit grew to $1.7 billion, up from $1 billion in 2024, and counted 68.3 million retail customers at the end of 2025.
Revolut declined to comment.
Founded in 2015, Revolut offers a range of services spanning multi-currency accounts, payment and transfer services, crypto products, insurance, and more. The neobank has been pouring truckloads of cash into expanding its operations internationally, and recently applied for a banking license in the United States.
Besides the U.K., Revolut has a banking license in the European Union, and it operates in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, and the U.S. Revolut launched operations in India last October, is about to start operating in Colombia this year, and has received a banking license in Mexico.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Amazon taps Sweden’s Einride for its electric big rigs
Einride is adding 75 of its electric heavy duty trucks to Amazon’s Relay freight network as part of a deal that gives the Swedish startup a toehold in the e-commerce giant’s operations. Einride will also provide charging infrastructure across five locations in the United States, under the agreement announced Tuesday.
Amazon isn’t buying or operating the electric trucks. Instead, Einride will own and manage (using its own Saga AI software) the trucks, which can be used by drivers in Amazon’s Relay freight network. Relay, launched in 2017, is an app that truck drivers can use to book hauling gigs with Amazon.
Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli, who took over as chief nearly a year ago, said working with Amazon is a powerful validation of the startup’s technology and strategic vision.
“By deploying our intelligent platform within one of the world’s most sophisticated logistics networks, we are accelerating growth, while continuing to build industry-leading operational expertise,” he said in a statement.
Einride has gained attention and investment for its two-pronged approach to freight. The company has developed and now operates a fleet of about 200 heavy-duty electric trucks for companies like Heineken, PepsiCo, and Carlsberg Sweden in Europe, North America, and the UAE. It has also developed autonomous pod-like trucks, which stand out for their cab-less design.
The agreement with Amazon doesn’t include the autonomous pods.
Einride has landed this agreement at a critical time: The startup is finalizing a merger with blank-check company Legato Merger Corp. and is expected to go public soon.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
While the agreement might not carry the same weight for Amazon, which has a market cap of $2.7 trillion, it does contribute to its low-carbon goals. Amazon has said it wants to reach net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2040.
“This rollout is an important step forward in addressing one of the toughest challenges we face in decarbonizing our transportation network — electrifying heavy-duty trucking,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We’re excited to continue to collaborate with Einride and learn from these operations as the trucks hit the road.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
YouTube expands its AI likeness detection technology to celebrities
YouTube is expanding its new “likeness detection” technology, which identifies AI-generated content, such as deepfakes, to people within the entertainment industry, the company announced on Tuesday.
The technology works similarly to YouTube’s existing Content ID system, which detects copyright-protected material in users’ uploaded videos, allowing rights owners to request removal or share in the video’s revenue.
Likeness detection does the same, but for simulated faces. The feature is meant to help protect creators and other public figures from having their identities used without their permission — a common problem for celebrities who find their likenesses have been used in scam advertisements.
The technology was first made available to a subset of YouTube creators in a pilot program last year before expanding more broadly to include politicians, government officials, and journalists this spring.
Now YouTube says the technology is being made available to those in the entertainment industry, including talent agencies, management companies, and the celebrities they represent. The company has support from major agencies like CAA, UTA, WME, and Untitled Management, which offered feedback on the new tool.
Use of the likeness detection tool does not require entertainers to have their own YouTube channels.
Instead, the feature scans for AI-generated content to detect visual matches of an enrolled participant’s face. Users can then choose to request removal of the video for privacy policy violations, submit a copyright removal request, or do nothing. YouTube notes that it won’t remove all content, as it permits parody and satire content under its rules.
In the future, the technology will support audio as well, the company says.
Related to this, YouTube has also been advocating for similar protections at a federal level, with its support for the NO FAKES Act in Washington, D.C. This would regulate the use of AI to create unauthorized re-creations of an individual’s voice and visual likeness.
The company hasn’t yet said how many removals of AI deepfakes have been managed by the tool so far, but noted in March that the amount of removals was still “very small.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
NASAs incredible new telescope will offer an atlas of the universe
400K MagSafe power banks recalled after fatal fire, the 10th power bank recall in a year
