Gushwork.ai, a worldwide platform that goals to advance enterprise course of outsourcing (BPO) utilizing AI and human experience, has raised $2.1 million in a pre-seed funding spherical led by Lightspeed. B Capital, Sparrow Capital, Seaborne Capital and Beenext additionally participated in backing the startup that launched in April this 12 months.
Lately, firms have invested appreciable quantities of cash in hiring expert professionals to supervise their operational processes, comparable to administration, HR, payroll administration or buyer assist. An rising various to in-house hiring is to interact with staffing companies or BPOs to outsource operations or to make use of platforms, comparable to Upwork or Fiverr to search out freelancers who can deal with process-oriented duties. Nevertheless, this has change into a major price issue resulting from ongoing inflation. Gushwork.ai strives to handle this drawback available in the market utilizing its AI-powered, cross-border platform.
The startup offers a curated market that options offshore staff educated in utilizing varied AI functions to assist companies perform their processes effectively. It lets entrepreneurs outsource their tedious workflows and focus solely on strategically vital duties.
Nayrhit Bhattacharya, co-founder and CEO of Gushwork.ai, calls the method “uberizing the worker workforce,” as companies can rent expertise from completely different markets for his or her manually pushed operational capabilities on a part-time foundation. He co-founded Gushwork.ai with Adithya Venkatesh (CPO) in January with a usage-based pricing mannequin.
“Companies don’t want to rent full-time,” Bhattacharya informed TechCrunch in an interview. “They’ll use anyone for just a few hours — three hours this week, 40 hours subsequent week — after which not use it for an additional week.”
Alongside providing part-time entry to offshore expertise, Gushwork.ai trains and equips its workforce with AI instruments to make them match for a lot of workflows that had been beforehand thought-about artistic and never merely process-oriented to a big extent. These could be producing photorealistic weblog designs, changing webinars to blogs, producing photographs for weblog writing, writing weblog posts on completely different subjects and even doing search engine marketing. Generative AI instruments have enabled massive workforces to carry out such artistic duties with out requiring particular expertise.
“You don’t want a 3D graphic designer per se, otherwise you don’t must spend three months looking for the suitable 3D graphic designer or the photorealistic picture copy generator on Upwork or Fiverr,” Bhattacharya famous.
Gushwork.ai has educated its AI-augmented workforce to carry out duties, comparable to lead prospecting, e mail advertising, advert administration, lead engagement on social media platforms, webinar moderation and advertising, social media administration, responding to inbound leads, CRM setup, social media analytics knowledge scraping, prospect outreach and advert marketing campaign administration, amongst others. These are all initially aimed toward easing gross sales and advertising operations workflows. Nevertheless, the startup additionally plans to increase into extra specialised roles sooner or later.
Inside the first three months of operation, Gushwork.ai noticed greater than 50 companies adopting its platform to delegate over 200 advanced workflows. Bhattacharya informed TechCrunch that round 80% of its clients use the platform on an energetic foundation each week, whereas virtually 90% of them use it each month.
The startup has its key outbound give attention to small and medium companies and bootstrapped startups within the U.S. and Canada which have a group measurement of two to 20-30 members. Bhattacharya stated that as a lot as 80% of its present buyer base includes small and medium companies.
Whereas developed economies are the dominating markets for Gushwork.ai, Bhattacharya stated it noticed practically 20% of its clients from India as effectively. The startup additionally considers India and the Philippines the preliminary provide bases for its offshore expertise, although it appears to be like to arrange its workforce base throughout completely different nations over time.
“The period of distant work has unlocked quite a few new job alternatives and workflows that may be executed from anyplace on the earth. This transcends past the standard IT companies or BPO trade. Gushwork.ai is leveraging this tailwind of cross-border price arbitrage and is constructing a singular platform for companies to delegate a few of their most advanced workflows to an elite on-demand offshore workforce educated on AI instruments and apps. We’re excited to companion with the group as they innovate and revitalize the way forward for outsourcing with AI,” stated Lightspeed companion Rahul Taneja in a ready assertion.
Within the subsequent few months, Gushwork.ai plans to make the most of the recent funds to boost high quality management and knowledge safety and privateness. It additionally appears to be like to construct options to assist companies create and doc their advanced processes inside Gushwork.ai’s platform and use them as massive coaching datasets to automate an inventory of workflows. Additional, it plans to speculate some capital in content-led natural market and private constructing channels to succeed in new clients.
The startup presently has over 25 full-time and part-time staff unfold throughout three nations, with Bhattacharya based mostly in Brooklyn and three founding members and co-founder Venkatesh in India’s Bengaluru.