New Delhi, February 26 AI startup Gushwork has raised USD 9 million, approximately INR 81 crore, in a funding round led by Susquehanna Asia VC, and plans to invest in product development, hiring talent, and customer acquisition, a top company official said on Thursday.
Venture capital firms Lightspeed and B Capital also participated in the funding round.
"We have raised USD 9 million primarily to invest in developing the AI stack. We are using several AI models. In addition, we have also developed our own models. To improve the accuracy of these models, we need to invest heavily in hiring engineers and product managers," said Nayrhit Bhattacharya, CEO and Co-founder, Gushwork AI.
"In addition, we also need to acquire customers," Bhattacharya added.
Gushwork builds agentic AI with a focus on autonomous marketing agents to increase visibility for businesses on AI search engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, as buyer behavior has fundamentally shifted towards AI-powered search.
The company has a team of around 70 people in Bengaluru and plans to grow 2-3 times in the next few months.
"We plan to expand the team to about 150-200 in the next six months. We currently have around 300 customers, and we should reach about 1,500 customers in the next 6 months. These are all small and medium businesses spread across the world," Bhattacharya said.
Asked about the threat from enterprise-focused large language models from companies like Anthropic, Bhattacharya said his firm is building solutions on top of the AI models of large technology firms, including Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT.
"We are a growing customer of Anthropic. We use their model extensively, and we also use OpenAI's model. Depending on the model provider, we have a significant portion that we have built ourselves. In fact, as the model gets better, our output becomes easier to control," he said.
