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Gushwork.ai a B2B automation software raises $2.1 million in funding led by Lightspeed

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Gushwork.ai, a managed marketplace of contractual workers who take up tasks in client companies’ sales and marketing workflows, has raised $2.1 million in a pre-seed funding round, led by Lightspeed. B Capital, Sparrow Capital, Seaborne Capital and Beenext also participated in the round. The startup plans to utilise the freshly-raised funds to drive its next phase of growth and build new product features, it said in a statement.

Gushwork.ai, with over 50 clients in its first three months of commencing operations, currently focuses on sales and marketing operations workflows. The set of clients which include Halsted Financial Services and Tratta.io are spread across India and the United States, with about 80% of them housed in the latter region, co-founder and CEO Nayrhit Bhattacharya told in an interaction.

Currently, the New York-headquartered startup has onboarded about 30 contractual workers who it has trained in business and creative software tools such as Midjourney, ChatGPT Plus, Apollo.io to take up tasks of Gushwork.ai clients’ workflows on-demand. The workflows include tasks such as lead prospecting, email marketing, advertisement management, lead engagement on social media platforms, webinar moderation and marketing, social media management, among others.

The clients are charged at a flat rate of $10 per hour. The contractual workers earn about $2,000 to $3,000 a month using the platform, Bhattacharya told. “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 for the lack of trust,” Bhattacharya said.

Gushwork.ai’s platform provides access to on-demand administrative teams, for business owners across industries, it said in a statement. Founded by Bhattacharya and Adithya Venkatesh, Gushwork.ai has over 25 full-time and part-time employees spread across three countries. While the company was incorporated in January 2023, it commenced operations two months later. The 50 businesses, early adopters, have delegated over 200 tedious workflows to Gushwork, translating to weekly savings of 1,000 person-hours, the statement said.

“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,” Rahul Taneja, partner, Lightspeed, said.

In the next few months, Gushwork.ai said it plans to build features that will help businesses create and document their complex processes within its platform. “These documented workflows will be used as large training datasets to automate complex workflows end to end as the GPT models get better at handling tasks,” it added. Additionally, Gushwork.ai plans to invest the raised capital in content-led organic marketing and personal branding channels to accelerate its growth while building a global network of remote AI specialists.