Gushwork.ai, a global platform that aims to advance business process outsourcing (BPO) using AI and human expertise, has raised $2.1 million in a pre-funding round led by Lightspeed. B Capital, Sparrow Capital, Seaborne Capital and Beenext also participated in backing the startup which was launched in April this year.
In recent years, companies have invested considerable amounts of money in hiring qualified professionals to oversee their operational processes, such as administration, human resources, payroll management or customer service. A growing alternative to in-house hiring is to engage with staffing agencies or BPOs to outsource operations, or use platforms such as Upwork or Fiverr to find freelancers who can handle process-oriented tasks. However, this has become a major cost factor due to ongoing inflation. Gushwork.ai strives to address this problem in the market through its AI-powered cross-border platform.
The startup offers a curated marketplace that includes overseas workers trained in the use of various AI applications to help businesses run their processes efficiently. It allows entrepreneurs to outsource their tedious workflows and focus only on strategically important tasks.
Nayrhit Bhattacharya, co-founder and CEO of Gushwork.ai, calls the process “the Uberization of the employee workforce,” as companies can hire talent from different markets for their part-time, manually driven operational roles. He co-founded Gushwork.ai with Adithya Venkatesh (CPO) in January with a usage-based pricing model.
“Companies don’t need to hire full-time,” Bhattacharya told TechCrunch in an interview. “They can use someone for a few hours (three hours this week, 40 hours next week) and then not use them for another week.”
In addition to providing part-time access to offshore talent, Gushwork.ai trains and equips its workforce with AI tools to adapt to many workflows that were previously considered creative and not just largely process-oriented . These can be generating photo-realistic blog layouts, turning webinars into blogs, generating images for blogging, writing blog posts on different topics or even doing search engine optimization. Generative AI tools have enabled large workers to perform these creative tasks without requiring special skills.
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“You don’t need a 3D graphic designer per se, or you don’t need to spend three months trying to find the right 3D graphic designer or photorealistic copy generator on Upwork or Fiverr,” Bhattacharya noted.
Gushwork.ai has trained its AI-augmented workforce to perform tasks such as prospecting, email marketing, ad management, lead engagement on social media platforms, moderation and marketing of webinars, social media management, responding to inbound leads, CRM setup, social media. media analytics data scraping, lead outreach, and ad campaign management, among others. All of them are initially intended to facilitate the workflows of sales and marketing operations. However, the startup also plans to expand into more specialized features in the future.
In the first three months of operation, Gushwork.ai saw more than 50 companies adopt its platform to delegate more than 200 complex workflows. Bhattacharya told TechCrunch that around 80% of his customers actively use the platform every week, while nearly 90% of them use it every month.
The startup has its key exit focus on small and medium-sized businesses and startups launched in the US and Canada that have a team size of two to 20-30 members. Bhattacharya said up to 80% of its current customer base consists of small and medium enterprises.
While developed economies are the dominant markets for Gushwork.ai, Bhattacharya said it also saw nearly 20% of its customers from India. The startup also sees India and the Philippines as initial supply bases for its offshore talent, although it is looking to establish its workforce in different countries over time.
“The age of remote work has unlocked a host 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 taking advantage of this tailwind of cross-border cost arbitrage. and is building a unique platform for companies to delegate some of their most complex workflows to an elite on-demand offshore workforce trained in AI tools and applications. We’re thrilled to partner with the team as they innovate and revitalize the future of outsourcing with AI.” Lightspeed partner Rahul Taneja said in a prepared statement.
In the coming months, Gushwork.ai plans to use the new funds to improve quality control and data security and privacy. It’s also looking to build features to help companies build and document their complex processes on Gushwork.ai’s platform and use them as large training datasets to automate a list of workflows. In addition, it plans to invest some capital in an organic market driven by content and self-created channels to reach new customers.
The startup currently has more than 25 full-time and part-time employees spread across three countries, with Bhattacharya based in Brooklyn and three founding members and co-founder Venkatesh in Bengaluru, India.
