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-round, 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 entrepreneur 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 sizable 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.