Gushwork.ai, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered global platform designed for enterprises to outsource highly complex operational workflows, has raised $2.1 million in pre-seed funding. Lightspeed led the investment with participation from B Capital, Sparrow Capital, Seaborne Capital and Beenext. 

Gushwork.ai plans to utilize these funds to drive its next growth phase and build out new product features while keeping the core team lean and agile. The company's offerings provide businesses with a solution to delegate critical operational tasks by bringing the best of humans and AI together. 

It is building a curated marketplace of an AI-trained human task force that can execute complex business processes seamlessly. This allows businesses to focus on strategic tasks while entrusting routine operations to Gush. 

Nayrhit Bhattacharya, co-founder and CEO of Gushwork.ai, said that the start-up's vision is to make it extremely easy for any business to delegate critical yet process-oriented business tasks reliably. 

"Getting expensive in-house employees to work on recurring, manual tasks or spending months trying to automate these processes is really suboptimal. 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," he added.

Headquartered in the US, Gushwork.ai has over 25 employees spread across three countries. Founded by Nayrhit Bhattacharya and Adithya Venkatesh, it was incorporated in January 2023 it commenced operations four months later.

Gushwork.ai claims to have witnessed substantial demand, with over 50 businesses adopting its product within the first three months of operation. These early adopters have delegated more than 200 monotonous workflows to Gush, translating to weekly savings of 1000 person-hours. The recent funding will accelerate Gushwork.ai's growth trajectory and enable wider accessibility of its product.

To begin with, Gushwork.ai is primarily focuses on sales and marketing operations workflows, encompassing tasks such as lead prospecting, email marketing, ad management, lead engagement on social media platforms, webinar moderation and marketing, social media management for SMBs, responding to inbound leads, CRM setup, social media analytics data scraping, prospect outreach, and ad campaign management, among others. The company plans to expand into more specialized roles in the future.

On the successful fundraise, Adithya Venkatesh, co-founder and chief product officer of Gushwork.ai, says, "We are very bullish about the future of AI. We believe that to truly embed AI in day-to-day business operations and solve the lack of trust in AI applications; we need to build a robust human-in-the-loop offering with a high trust factor. We are building the world's most affordable and reliable way of executing complex tasks by bringing the best of offshoring and AI together."

"The era of remote work has unlocked several 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 leveraging this tailwind of cross-border cost arbitrage and is building a unique platform for businesses to delegate some of their most complex workflows to an elite on-demand offshore workforce trained on AI tools and apps. We are excited to partner with the team as they innovate and revitalize the future of outsourcing with AI," says Rahul Taneja, Partner, Lightspeed.

"Having experienced the offshoring industry first-hand over the last few years, it is incredibly exciting for me to see an AI-first approach to reinvent this business. I have been an investor and an early user of Gush and already a big fan. They are reimagining the offshoring industry with generative AI and remote work technologies of 2023," says Pran Navanandan from Seaborne Capital.

Gushwork.ai plans to build features to help businesses create and document their complex processes within Gush's platform in the next few months. 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. In addition to the investment in building new features, Gushwork.ai also plans to invest this capital in content-led organic marketing and personal branding channels to accelerate its growth while building a global network of remote AI specialists.