Back in 2022, João Moura was leading the AI engineering efforts at Clearbit, a startup creating an integrated hub for business intelligence tools. There, Moura led the development of AI integration and was responsible for defining Clearbit's AI product roadmap.
A year later, HubSpot acquired Clearbit, but Moura wanted to go it alone. He previously founded startups such as Urdog, which sells smart collars for pets. But for this go-around, Moura had a more technically ambitious concept in mind.
Moura's latest company, CrewAI, aims to automate repetitive back-office tasks like summarizing reports and onboarding employees. Customers can use CrewAI's platform to build workflow automation, deploy and track it from a dashboard.
CrewAI does not train the AI model itself. Rather, the company leverages models from vendors like OpenAI and Anthropic to drive automation. Businesses can build workflows on top of the apps they already use to automate enriching marketing databases, analyzing customer feedback, predicting trends, and more.
Moura pitches CrewAI as an alternative to robotic process automation (RPA). RPA drives workflow automation. However, this is a stricter form based on preset “if-then” rules.
“We enable teams to build groups of AI ‘agents’ to perform tasks using any model, integrate with over 1,000 different applications, and do it in a way that protects data privacy. “We made it easier,” Moura said. “We encourage customers to try multiple models and choose the one that provides the best results for their specific business use case.”
Create automations using CrewAI's tools. Image credit: CrewAI
RPA is certainly fragile and error-prone. According to a 2022 study by RPA vendor Robocorp, 69% of organizations that implemented RPA experienced workflow interruptions at least once a week. The entire business is built around helping companies manage their RPA installations and prevent corruption.
Of course, AI can also break. Rather, they may hallucinate or suffer from the effects of prejudice. Still, Moura insists it's a much more resilient technology than RPA.
Investors seem to agree. CrewAI has raised $18 million in seed and Series A funding from backers including Boldstart Ventures, Craft Ventures, Earl Gray Capital, and Insight Partners. Coursera co-founder and AI entrepreneur Andrew Ng is also an investor, as is HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah.
CrewAI has plenty of competition. Orby, Bardeen (also funded by HubSpot), Tektonic, 11x.ai, Twin Labs, and Emergence are all developing similar AI-powered business-centric workflow automation products. Meanwhile, traditional RPA vendors such as Automation Anywhere and UiPath are working to incorporate more AI technology into their tools to stay relevant.
To its credit, CrewAI is currently valued at around $100 million and has managed to attract a significant number of customers, 150 in its first year. (CrewAI launched in January.) And we're looking to further expand our use of Enterprise Cloud, a new managed subscription plan.
Built on open source components CrewAI has released over the past year, Enterprise Cloud provides additional access controls and analytics to help secure and audit your automations. Subscribers also have access to “VIP” support and workflow templates.
“We have 100,000 groups of multi-AI runs per day across hundreds of different use cases,” Moura said. “Given our current pipeline, we could be cash flow positive by next summer.”
CrewAI, which is based in San Francisco and Brazil, plans to use the funding to add 16 employees and expand its core automation products.