Announcing our investment in CrewAI; powering the future of AI in the enterprise with multi-agent automation — Welcome to boldstart!
The automation market is enormous. It evolves with every new technology era, from punched card tabulators that automated the US Census over a century ago — to cloud computing enabled RPA (Robotic Process Automation) over the last decade. Today, AI agents powered by LLMs are creating another order of magnitude stepchange in the quest to automate complex tasks better, faster, and cheaper.
Enter CrewAI, which started as an open source framework making it easy for developers to orchestrate AI agents into teams and work collaboratively to automate a complex process. Unlike the previous paradigm of agents, where a single agent would try to reason and complete a task, CrewAI flips this on its head by allowing multiple agents to collaborate and accomplish the same task — significantly faster and more accurately.
This simple yet powerful approach has gained massive adoption. In less than a year, CrewAI has powered over 100 million multi-agent systems in 150 countries and is being used by more than 50% of Fortune 500 companies — automating workflows not previously possible with legacy RPA technology. For example, CrewAI easily extracts, validates, and processes unstructured invoices autonomously, where RPA struggles to be accurate with non-standard formats.
Building on the success of its open source offering, the company has launched CrewAI Enterprise and partnered with companies like IBM (read more here).
Looking back to the beginning, we originally met CrewAI’s founder João (Joe) Moura thanks to Amit Vasudev, cofounder of Clearbit. João previously built Clearbit’s machine learning infrastructure and was responsible for their AI roadmap. After they were acquired by Hubspot, João wanted to share his expertise with the community. So he created CrewAI (and it also automated his thought leadership on LinkedIn 💪)
In our first conversation, it was immediately clear to me and the boldstart team we wanted to partner with Joao. It wasn’t because agentic systems were popular (they were not at the time); it was because João had a clear and compelling market vision, and was building / shipping extremely fast to make it a reality… this is the type of founder that gets us out of bed every morning at boldstart!
We’re not the only ones who were impressed with CrewAI. Check out CrewAI’s first course with Andrew Ng and stay tuned for the second coming soon featuring an early enterprise customer discussing multiple cases. It’s early days, but there is no doubt that agentic systems are the future of software. We are fired 🔥 up to be partnered with Joao, cofounder Rob Bailey, and the entire team at CrewAI. And if you’re excited as well, come join the CrewAI mission — they are hiring!
Read more about CrewAI on Techcrunch and Venturebeat. Also tune into Shomik Ghosh, João Moura, and I discussing everything agents on the Software Snack bites podcast.
… And if you’re a bold founder reimagining the enterprise, reach out to us @boldstartvc!