CrewAI Secures $18M Funding and Launches Enterprise Platform for AI Agents

Agentic AI startup CrewAI closes $18M funding round - SiliconANGLE

CrewAI Inc., the developer of a popular tool for building artificial intelligence agents, has raised $18 million in funding to support its growth efforts. The startup announced the milestone today. It raised the capital over two rounds: a seed investment led by boldstart ventures and a Series A raise led by Insight Partners. CrewAI's backers also include prominent AI researcher Andrew Ng and HubSpot Inc. co-founder Dharmesh Shah. Many enterprise machine learning projects revolve around so-called AI agents. Those are large language models customized to perform a narrow set of tasks. An e-commerce company, for example, could create an agent that uses GPT-4o to generate shopping advice based on customers' past purchases. CrewAI has created an open-source framework of the same name that makes it easier for developers to build AI agents. It also promises to simplify several related chores. Most notably, CrewAI's framework enables AI agents to collaborate with one another on complex tasks. Using the software, a brick-and-mortar retailer could create an agent that searches the web for information on rival stores. The company's developers could then create a second agent that summarizes the collected information and visualizes the most important data points in graphs. Under the hood, CrewAI automates auxiliary tasks such as facilitating the movement of data between agents. The framework integrates with another open-source tool called LangChain. Using the latter software, developers can enable their AI agents to interact with third-party systems such as databases and search engines. LangChain provides prepackaged integrations with dozens of applications that remove the need for software teams to build custom connectors. After they create a collection of AI agents, developers can use a testing tool built into CrewAI to ensure that the software works as intended. The tool assigns the agents a set of sample tasks and measures the accuracy with which they are completed. "Agents are the key to unlocking AI's potential and will completely redesign the way companies deliver products," said CrewAI founder and Chief Executive Officer João Moura. "RPA and LLMs alone can't get you there." CrewAI generates revenue by selling a paid version of its framework, CrewAI Enterprise, that moved into general availability in conjunction with today's funding announcement. The offering provides a no-code interface for building AI agents. It also includes templates for common use cases that spare developers the hassle of building everything from scratch. For administrators, in turn, CrewAI Enterprise offers features that ease the task of running agents in production. The software monitors AI models' performance and generates an alert when it detects issues. There are also cybersecurity controls that enable administrators to regulate who can access which agent. CrewAI Enterprise's launch into general availability today follows a beta program that ran for several months. According to the company, more than 150 enterprise customers signed up for the software in that time frame.

CrewAI Secures $18 Million Funding and Launches Enterprise Cloud Platform for AI Agents

The new platform enables teams of all sizes to automate workflows and develop AI-agent native features and applications Autonomous AI agents startup, CrewAI has secured $18 million in funding, including an inception round led by boldstart ventures and a Series A led by Insight Partners. The funding round also included contributions from Blitzscaling Ventures, Craft Ventures, Earl Grey Capital, and notable AI figures such as Andrew Ng and Dharmesh Shah. The company's open-source platform executes over 10 million agents monthly and is utilised by nearly half of the Fortune 500. The company recently partnered with IBM to help enterprises across the US and globally adopt AI agents at scale. CrewAI was founded by João Moura in January 2023. Moura, who previously directed AI engineering efforts at Clearbit, launched CrewAI shortly after Clearbit's acquisition by HubSpot. "This investment is a major validation of our vision: CrewAI is delivering on the promise of generative AI for enterprise, transforming automation by harnessing the power of AI agents," said Moura in a post on X. In response to user demand, CrewAI introduced CrewAI Enterprise, allowing large organisations to build, monitor, and iterate on complex AI agents efficiently. The platform has attracted 150 beta enterprise customers in under six months. New functionalities include self-iteration, performance evaluation, persistent memory, and various agent collaboration structures. "With the launch of CrewAI Enterprise, we're making it even easier for large organisations to design, test, and deploy complex AI agents at scale, with high-quality results," said Moura. Following a successful private beta, CrewAI has launched its Enterprise Cloud offering, a universal platform that enables organisations to build crews of AI agents suited to their unique workloads. The platform supports any large language model (LLM) or cloud platform, allowing teams to achieve high-quality results. Built on CrewAI's popular open-source framework, the Enterprise offering facilitates rapid iterations by providing templates, extensive VIP support, and integrated security features. CrewAI Enterprise allows users to leverage its framework or Crew Studio to create complex multi-agent systems easily. Organisations can deploy multi-agent automations in a secure production environment while maintaining appropriate access and control measures. They can also track ROI through testing and training tools to continuously enhance efficiency and quality of results. The new platform enables teams of all sizes to automate workflows and develop AI-agent native features and applications. During the beta phase, CrewAI observed companies utilising the platform to build crews for hundreds of different use cases.

CrewAI now lets you build fleets of enterprise AI agents

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More AI agents hold much promise, with some saying they will revolutionize the workplace itself. But they can be a bit concept-y, and enterprises don't always know where to begin. One-year-old startup CrewAI has quickly become one of the most popular AI agent frameworks -- it's used by the likes of AI pioneer Andrew Ng, among many other leading companies -- as it simplifies the building and deployment of multi-agent systems. Today, the company is launching its first -- and highly-anticipated -- product to market, CrewAI Enterprise. The platform, which has been in beta for some months, enables users to build, deploy and iterate multi-agent "crews." The company is also announcing an $18 million funding round. CrewAI founder and CEO João Moura called the opportunity for AI agents "immense." "The AI agent is basically right now an LLM that doesn't need to be part of conversations," he told VentureBeat. "Instead of a conversation, you give it a task, and it has the agency to autonomously decide what to do and when to do it." 'The simpler the better,' open-source critical According to Markets and Markets, the AI agent industry will grow dramatically in the next five years, from $5 billion this year to nearly $50 billion by 2030. Capgemini reports that 10% of large enterprises are already using AI agents, more than half plan to use them in the next year and 82% will adopt them within the next three years. "Agents are the big thing everyone's talking about right now,"said Moura. "The genie is not going back into the bottle. People want this to happen." CrewAI, which was just founded in 2023, has already established itself as one of the most popular agent frameworks, competing with the likes of Langraph and Autogen. Moura noted that enterprises are more and more quickly moving from AI agent conception to use cases. "What we're noticing is that companies are graduating way faster than we expected," he said. The company's new platform is built on top of its popular open-source framework and enables organizations to build crews of AI agents using any large language model (LLM) or cloud platform. Users can plan and build multi-agent systems; securely deploy those agents into a production environment with custom levels of access and control; and iterate and track ROI with testing and training tools. When getting started with AI agents, "the simpler the better," said Moura. That's what sets CrewAI apart, he said; they also have "doubled down" on educating people. "It's a brand new category and market," he said. "People are trying to understand how they should go about this, they want to be educated." He noted of other competing projects, "it's almost like they're trying to make it complex on purpose." CrewAI also has significant open-source traction. The company has a "very opinionated" view on how agents work. Open-source is an instrumental part of how the world builds software, Moura noted and is an "amazing distribution channel." "The world runs on open-source, every software out there uses open-source libraries," he said. "We don't want to be in a world where all models are closed source, you don't know what's going on, you're locked in with all these vendors." Use cases from internal processes to marketing Moura pointed to a "big array of use cases" for agentic AI overall and called CrewAI's offering "such a cross vertical product." The most common use cases are around internal automations, marketing and coding, he noted. Agents can perform research, summarization and reporting, and can also help with legal analysis. For instance, one Fortune 500 customer with consumer-facing products was looking to update legacy projects and apps (including Java and SAP). They were able to build agents that can update and test code themselves before passing them off for final review by a human engineer. They are saving hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result (by their own estimate), said Moura. "Marketing's another interesting one," he noted. Agents can develop leads by interacting with large, instant sources of information. Or, in the case of real estate companies, agents can monitor markets, produce leads and advise agents on buy-or-rent scenarios. Moura pointed to a big beverage company that used CrewAI to build agents that handle internal requests from a portal accessible by thousands of employees. A series of very specific rules need to be reviewed before internal requests can be approved, Moura explained; agents understand and review those rules, reply to requests (whether they were approved or not or if more info is needed). Robotic process automation (RPA) systems then take over to port stored information into the company's database. Getting even more complex, Moura said CrewAI's platform has been used by a big media company that fine-tuned models to act like movie directors: They can cut frames and add subtitles and music, then automatically push out to social media. "People are always pushing the cutting edge," said Moura. Millions of agents, significant traction among Fortune 500 CrewAI's open-source platform executes 10 million-plus agents a month, and the company claims it is already being used by nearly half of the Fortune 500. It signed its first 150 beta enterprise customers in less than six months. "I gotta say it has been insane. I think we're one of the fastest-growing projects out there," said Moura. "It's very intense and very humbling." Crew AI's inception round was led by boldstart ventures, and its series A was led by Insight Partners. Additional funding comes from Blitzscaling Ventures, Craft Ventures, Earl Grey Capital and several top angels including Ng and Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot. Ng noted in a statement: "CrewAI makes it easy and fast to develop both simple and complex multi-agent AI workflows. Its powerful orchestration features for enterprises -- including memory and self-healing -- help businesses go well beyond traditional automation."

CrewAI uses third-party models to automate business tasks

Back in 2022, João Moura was directing AI engineering efforts at Clearbit, a startup creating a unified hub for business intelligence tools. There, Moura was responsible for leading the development of AI integrations, as well as defining Clearbit's AI product roadmap. After a year, HubSpot acquired Clearbit, and Moura had the itch to go it alone. He'd founded startups before, including Urdog, which sold a smart collar for pets. But this go-around, Moura had a more technically ambitious concept in mind. Moura's newest company, CrewAI, aims to automate repetitive, back-office tasks like summarizing reports and onboarding employees. Customers can build workflow automations using CrewAI's platform, then deploy and track them from a dashboard. CrewAI doesn't train AI models itself. Rather, the company taps models from vendors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to drive automations. Companies can build workflows on top of the apps they already use to automate things like enriching marketing databases, analyzing customer feedback, and forecasting trends. Moura pitches CrewAI as an alternative to robotic process automation, or RPA. RPA drives workflow automation. But it's a much more rigid form based on "if-then" preset rules. "We have made it easy for teams to build groups of AI 'agents' to perform tasks using any model, integrate with more than a thousand different applications, and to do so in a way that protects 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 indeed brittle -- and error-prone. A 2022 survey from Robocorp, an RPA vendor, found that of the organizations that said they'd adopted RPA, 69% experienced broken workflows at least once weekly. Entire businesses have been made out of helping enterprises manage their RPA installations and prevent them from breaking. Of course, AI can break, too -- or rather, hallucinate and suffer from the effects of bias. Still, Moura argues that it's a far more resilient tech than RPA. Investors seem to agree. CrewAI has raised $18 million across seed and Series A rounds from backers including Boldstart Ventures, Craft Ventures, Earl Grey Capital, and Insight Partners. Coursera co-founder and AI enterpreneur Andrew Ng has also invested, as has Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder and CTO of HubSpot. CrewAI has competition in spades. Orby, Bardeen (which also has funding from HubSpot), Tektonic, 11x.ai, Twin Labs, and Emergence are all developing similar AI-powered, business-focused workflow automation products. Traditional RPA vendors like Automation Anywhere and UiPath, meanwhile, are working to incorporate more AI tech into their tools 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 released over the past year, Enterprise Cloud provides 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." CrewAI, which is based in San Francisco and Brazil, plans to use the cash it has raised so far to grow its 16-person workforce and expand its core automation products.