AI startup Gushwork.ai, which enables small and medium businesses (SMBs) with access to on-demand remote workforce, has raised $2.1 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by venture capital firm Lightspeed while B Capital, Sparrow Capital, Seaborne Capital, and Beenext also participated. Gushwork.ai said it plans to deploy the capital for growth and develop new product features.
The company allows businesses trained administrative teams to manage workflows. Founded by Nayrhit Bhattacharya and Adithya Venkatesh, Gushwork.ai was incorporated in January this year and commenced operations in April. Since then, Gushwork.ai has grown to over 50 clients across multiple industries.
“Getting expensive in-house employees to work on recurring, manual tasks or spending months trying to imperfectly automate these processes is really suboptimal. The complexity of these tasks is such that most companies do not trust AI to execute them without human oversight. We want to embed AI in the very core of business operations by bringing in a reliable human touch on top of AI to solve the lack of trust,” said Nayrhit Bhattacharya, Co-founder & CEO of Gushwork.ai in a statement.
The company said its clients have delegated more than 200 tedious workflows to Gushwork, translating to weekly savings of 1,000 person-hours. It primarily focuses on sales and marketing operations workflows, encompassing tasks such as lead prospecting, email marketing, ad management, lead engagement on social media platforms, webinar moderation & marketing, social media management for SMBs, responding to inbound leads, CRM setup, social media analytics data scraping, and more. The company intends to expand into more specialized roles ahead.
“The era of remote work has unlocked a number of new job opportunities and workflows that can be executed from anywhere in the world. This transcends beyond the traditional IT services or BPO industry. Gushwork.ai is leveraging this tailwind of cross-border cost arbitrage, and is building a unique platform for businesses to delegate some of their most complex workflows to an elite on-demand offshore workforce trained on AI tools and apps” said Rahul Taneja, Partner, Lightspeed.
The company said it plans to build features that will help businesses create and document their complex processes which will be used as large training datasets to automate complex workflows as the GPT models get better at handling tasks. Moreover, it also plans to invest the capital in content-led organic marketing and personal branding channels to accelerate its growth.