Jaden Schaefer

The round had a bunch of other people in it.

There was Nexus Venture Partners, First Round Capital, Y Combinator, Box Group, and the Canon Project and Shopify.

So it's interesting because Shopify is one of the customers that uses it.

And now they're investing.

I think we actually see this a lot with software, especially with these bigger firms.

If they can go find a startup and they're willing to use the product, they like the product, and probably they're seeing a lot of, you know, internally at the company, it's saving them a lot of time and money and their employees are using it.

They're like, well, that's probably going to be the case with a lot of other companies.

And I've actually seen some investors, it's kind of their like, it's their strategy to invest in their, invest in their like expense sheet, basically.

The companies that they spend money on, they invest in them.

so one thing that i think is interesting um gum loop wasn't actually actively raising money um but broder said that uh you know the timing felt right and benchmark kind of reached out to them and said hey look we see you guys are growing we'd be interested in helping you put together a round um and benchmark by the way uh is the comp i mean obviously tier one vc but they've invested in like ebay uber dropbox so they've been into a lot of these and so i think because of that

Broder, whose leading gum loop was like, look, this is a big, you know, big firm.

They obviously have a lot of great connections.

And so he wanted to get in with it.

Originally, his goal when he was building this company, though, Broder, he said that he was envisioning building just a 10 person billion dollar company.

That was his goal.

He just wanted this to be like super lean.

And, you know, with AI agents and especially because his company is an AI agent company, I think that would have been some incredible marketing to be like, look, we reached, you know, a billion dollar, a billion dollar valuation.

And we've just done the whole thing with just 10 people.

And we've been using AI agents.

There's an interesting report that came out.