Gushwork.ai Raises $2M, led by Lightspeed, to Outsource Business Tasks to Workforces Trained in AI
Introduction:
A pre-seed fundraising round led by Lightspeed netted $2.1 million for Gushwork.ai, a worldwide platform that promises to revolutionize business process outsourcing (BPO) utilizing AI and human knowledge. The startup was backed by B Capital, Sparrow Capital, Seaborne Capital, and Beenext and debuted in April of this year.
Companies have recently invested in acquiring qualified personnel to run their administrative, human resources, payroll, and customer service procedures. Engaging with staffing agencies or BPOs to outsource operations or using platforms like Upwork or Fiverr to find freelancers who can execute process-oriented activities are becoming increasingly popular alternatives to recruiting employees in-house. However, this has become a substantial cost factor due to continued inflation. Gushwork.ai aims to solve this market issue with its cross-border, AI-powered platform.
The startup offers a carefully curated marketplace with offshore workers skilled in using different AI apps to aid businesses in running their processes successfully. It enables business owners to outsource their arduous operations and concentrate only on crucial things strategically.
In addition to providing part-time access to offshore talent, Gushwork.ai trains and provides its employees with AI tools to prepare them for various workflows previously seen as creative and more than merely process-oriented. Some examples are the creation of photorealistic blog designs, the conversion of webinars to blogs, the result of graphics for blog writing, the creation of blog posts on various subjects, and even SEO work. Thanks to generative AI techniques, large workforces may now complete such creative jobs without needing specialized expertise.
Gushwork.ai had more than 50 organizations embrace its platform within the first three months of operation to outsource more than 200 complicated workflows. According to Bhattacharya, who spoke with TechCrunch, nearly 90% of the platform’s users use it monthly.
Gushwork.ai Raises $2M, led by Lightspeed:
Gushwork.ai Raises $2M, led by Lightspeed (Image Source: flatworldsolutions.com)
The startup’s main external focus is on small and medium-sized businesses and bootstrapped startups in the United States and Canada with teams of two to 20-30 employees. According to Bhattacharya, up to 80% of the company’s current clients are small and medium-sized businesses.
Although Gushwork.ai primarily targets industrialized economies, Bhattacharya said approximately 20% of its customers are from India. The business also views the Philippines and India as its first sources of offshore talent, though it plans to diversify its worker base over time.
Gushwork.ai intends to use the additional funding over the coming several months to improve quality assurance, data security, and privacy. It plans to develop tools enabling companies to import their intricate processes onto the Gushwork.ai platform, document them, and use the resulting enormous training datasets to automate various workflows.
With Bhattacharya based in Brooklyn and the other three founding members and co-founder Venkatesh in Bengaluru, India, the firm employs over 25 full-time and part-time workers across three nations.