Gushwork AI secures ₹81 crore funding led by Susquehanna Asia VC

AI start-up Gushwork has raised $9 million, about ₹81 crore, in a funding round led by Susquehanna Asia VC and plans to invest in product development, hiring talents and customer acquisition, a top company official said on Thursday.

Venture capital Lightspeed and B Capital also participated in the funding round.

"We have raised $9 million primarily to invest in developing the AI stack. We are using several AI models. On top of that, we have worked on our own models as well. To improve the accuracy of the models, we have to invest a lot of money in hiring engineers, hiring product managers.

"On top of that, we have to acquire customers as well, said Nayrhit Bhattacharya, CEO and Co-founder, Gushwork AI said.

Gushwork builds agentic AI with focus on autonomous marketing agents to increase visibility for businesses on AI Search engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity as buyer behaviour has fundamentally shifted toward 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 have about 300 customers, and in the next 6 months or so, we should be at about 1,500 customers. These are all small and medium businesses spread across the world, essentially," Bhattacharya said.

Asked about the threat from the enterprise-focussed large language models from companies like Anthropic, Bhattacharya said his firm is building solutions on top of 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 heavily, and we use OpenAI's model as well. Depending on the model provider, we have a significant chunk that we have built ourselves. In fact, the model gets better, our output gets easier to control," he said.