In 2022, João Moura was working on AI engineering at a startup called Clearbit, where he was engaged in the effort to create a unified, single platform that would consolidate all business intelligence tools. He was leading on developing integrations with AI technologies and also helped define Clearbit's product roadmap in AI products.

A year into the company, HubSpot acquired Clearbit and Moura was just ready to strike out on his own. He had started companies before - Urdog being one such venture which sold a smart collar for pets. However this time around, Moura was a tad more ambitious with what he wanted to do.

New company from Moura, CrewAI, focuses on automation of repetitive, back-office jobs, such as summarizing reports or employee onboarding. With a platform from CrewAI, users can build their workflow automations and deploy and manage them on a dashboard.

In other words, CrewAI does not train its own AI models. Instead, the company uses those of vendors like OpenAI and Anthropic to power its automations. This means that businesses can build workflows atop the applications they already use to automate functions such as enriching marketing databases, analyzing customer feedback, and forecasting trends.

Moura markets CrewAI as a competitor to robotic process automation, or RPA. RPA is what fuels workflow automation. However, it's much more of a rigid form based on "if-thens" and preset rules.

"We've made it easy for teams to create groups of AI 'agents' that do tasks using any model, integrate with over a thousand different applications and do so in a way that respects their data privacy," Moura said. "We encourage our customers to try multiple models and pick the models that provide the best results for specific business use cases."

RPA is brittle — and brittle by nature, it tends to err. A 2022 survey conducted by Robocorp, a provider of RPA, found that out of the organizations who claimed to have implemented RPA, 69% experienced broken workflows at least once a week. Entire businesses have been made helping enterprises manage their RPA installations to prevent these from breaking.

Of course, AI can break, too — or rather, hallucinate and suffer from the effects of bias. Yet Moura argues that it's a much tougher tech than RPA.

Investors seem to agree. The startup has so far raised $18 million in seed and series A funding from investors that include Boldstart Ventures, Craft Ventures, Earl Grey Capital, and Insight Partners. Coursera co-founder and AI entrepreneur Andrew Ng invested as well, as did Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot's co-founder and chief technology officer.

The competition is strong. Orby, Bardeen-the latter is backed by HubSpot, too- Tektonic, 11x.ai, Twin Labs, and Emergence are all working on similar AI-driven business workflow automation products. Even traditional RPA incumbents- like Automation Anywhere and UiPath-are taking to infusing AI into their software in an effort to stay relevant.

To its credit, CrewAI, which is currently valued at around $100 million, has managed to attract a sizeable number of customers — 150 — in its first year. (CrewAI launched in January.) And it's angling to land more with Enterprise Cloud, a new managed subscription plan.

Built on top of open-source components CrewAI has launched over the past 12 months, Enterprise Cloud adds additional access controls and analytics to help secure and audit automations. Subscribers also get "VIP" support and templates for workflows.

"We are seeing 100,000 groups of multi-AI executions per day across hundreds of different use cases," Moura said. "Given our current pipeline, we could be cash-flow-positive by next summer.".

In a development which should keep the brains working for a long time, San Francisco-based and Brazil-based CrewAI has announced that it plans to expand its core automation products with the cash it has raised so far for its 16-person workforce.