Skip to content
YC Root AccessYC Root Access

Building AI Agents for Everyone

Gumloop (YC W24) is an AI agent builder used by companies like Shopify, Gusto, and Instacart. It lets employees build and share agents that automate work across their existing tools, while IT controls security, data access, and costs. In this Fireside, co-founders Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal talk to Y Combinator General Partner Gustaf Alströmer share how better models transformed their visual workflow builder into an agent platform, what they learned from 1,100 customer calls, and how one power user helped them land Instacart. They also explain why bringing agents into tools like Slack drives adoption and why the people who understand a task should be the ones automating it—to help teams do more, not simply replace them. https://www.gumloop.com Chapters: 00:00 — The AI Agent Builder for Every Team 03:38 — From Workflow Automation to Enterprise AI 07:20 — What It Takes to Win Enterprise Customers 11:02 — How the Founders Met and Got Into YC 15:00 — How Gumloop Uses Its Own Agents 18:02 — Landing Shopify and Rethinking Pricing 21:23 — Fundraising and the Limits of Staying Lean 24:35 — Letting Employees Automate Their Own Work 27:43 — Building Agents Companies Can Control 31:23 — Getting IT to Say Yes Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

Gustaf AlströmerhostMax Brodeur-UrbasguestRahul Behalguest
Oct 2, 202634mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Gumloop’s enterprise agent builder: employee automation with IT governance and control

  1. Gumloop is an enterprise agent-building platform that lets any team create and share AI agents while giving IT centralized governance over data, permissions, and observability.
  2. The product evolved from a pre-agent workflow automation builder into a full agent platform once models became reliable enough for end-to-end task automation.
  3. Their enterprise traction came from bottom-up champions and internal virality (especially via Slack), then expanded through security/compliance features that satisfy procurement and IT requirements.
  4. Gumloop pushes AI-native adoption by embedding agents where work happens and by making agent use collaborative and visible across teams.
  5. They shifted to transparent, usage-based pricing and model-provider neutrality to position Gumloop as core internal infrastructure and reduce lock-in concerns.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Gumloop’s wedge is “agents for everyone” with IT-grade control.

Gumloop positions itself as an “agent hub” where any employee can build and deploy agents, while IT retains control via enterprise security and governance features. The core promise is broad internal agent creation without creating a security/compliance nightmare.

They survived the pre-frontier era by meeting models “where they were,” then rode the step-change.

They started as a visual workflow automation product because early models weren’t reliable or economical enough for fully autonomous agents. As models improved, adding agents created the “hockey stick” adoption moment because end-to-end automation became feasible.

Distribution and collaboration (not just model quality) drives internal AI-native behavior.

Adoption accelerates when agents live inside the tools people already use (Slack/Teams/email) and when coworkers can see and reuse each other’s agents. This “multiplayer” visibility reduces the blank-page problem and spreads best practices organically.

Enterprise AI success is mostly governance plumbing, not just agent UX.

Enterprise deals are won (and expanded) by satisfying the long list of requirements—RBAC, SCIM/SAML, audit logs, data residency/own-cloud deployment, API-key control, observability—often before end users feel the magic. Speed of responding and shipping to these needs builds trust and unlocks broad rollout.

A single strong champion can bootstrap enterprise distribution and even become core team DNA.

Their first enterprise foothold (Instacart) came from a passionate internal champion who spread usage, brought them into internal channels, and later joined Gumloop—teaching them procurement, pricing, and how to sell internally. Word-of-mouth then carried to other logos (e.g., Shopify) as employees moved companies.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

I took, like, 1,100 customer calls the first year.

— Max Brodeur-Urbas

Like, how, they're like, "These, these 500 users need to be able to do these 10 things... We need to host it in our own cloud. We need to have audit logging for every tool. We need to have APIs to get that into our data lake." Like, it, it never ends.

— Max Brodeur-Urbas

Bringing agents to where they're already doing work has been the biggest unlock for us.

— Max Brodeur-Urbas

The people who understand the tasks should be the ones automating them.

— Max Brodeur-Urbas

It's not about, like, tricking an investor to think that your company's cool or having a better pitch deck than someone else.

— Max Brodeur-Urbas

Agent builder for non-technical teamsSlack/Teams distribution and collaborationWorkflow automation to autonomous agents transitionEnterprise security: RBAC, SCIM, SAML, audit logsInternal champions and word-of-mouth enterprise growthTemplates, workshops, and onboarding enablementUsage-based transparent pricing and orchestration fee model

High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.

Get more out of YouTube videos.

High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.

iOSAndroidClaudeChrome