How Gumloop became the agent layer for entire companies
Key points
Key takeaways from YC Root Access interview with Gumloop co-founders Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal (October 2026):
Agent layer for the whole company. Gumloop's visual agent builder, used by teams at Shopify, Gusto and Instacart, lets non-engineers build and share agents across a business while keeping data managed and controlled, backed by an SDK/API, hundreds of MCP-server integrations and a presence in Slack and Microsoft Teams.
AgentHub before agents worked. The company launched as AgentHub, a visual workflow-automation platform built when models were not good enough: AI was used sparingly, only for key steps inside larger workflows; adding an agent layer later made usage skyrocket and made end-to-end automation possible.
Co-founders found at a meetup. Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal met at a roughly 30-person AI meetup in Vancouver right after the GPT API came out; the same morning Max's co-founder had quit. Rahul's demoing co-founder later joined as a founding engineer,and they then worked 12-hour days in a co-working space until applying to Y Combinator, Max's fourth application.
PLG roots, enterprise money. Early users were mostly solo: indie hackers and individuals who automated personal tasks, such as transcribing a Dungeons and Dragons session; an unnamed Australian health-tech company automating research showed that enterprises would pay far more and need deeper value, steering the pivot toward them.
The enterprise checklist. Big customers demanded role-based access control, SCIM, SAML, audit logging, their own API keys, self-managed cloud hosting and data-lake APIs: all the quiet depth required before end users get their it-just-worked moment.
Eleven hundred calls. Max took about 1,100 customer calls in year one, landing in the top 1% of Cal.com users: hand-holding early users to working automations while honing the pitch toward the enterprise platform call by call.
Enterprise beachheads, not cold sales. Instacart, its first real enterprise customer, came via an internal power-user champion who taught everyone there how to automate,and later became one of Gumloop's first employees) champions then carried the tool to new companies, driving natural next-logo growth.
Activation by template,and agents where work happens. Templates, following the Y Combinator advice to start with threeand come back with a hundred, were complemented by workshopsand hand-held onboarding;the biggest unlock,the founders argue,is putting agents inside the tools teams already spend their day in: Slack, email threads, Teams, rather than another platform to visit.
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