Gushwork AI Raises $9M in Seed Funding Round

Gushwork AI Bags $9 Million in Seed Funding to Revolutionize AI-Powered Marketing for SMBs

The world of agentic artificial intelligence is growing at a pace that was hard to imagine even a couple of years ago. Funding rounds are no longer just about survival capital — they are bold statements of vision, signalling how startups believe the future of business discovery will work. In that spirit, Gushwork AI, a Bengaluru-based agentic AI startup that builds autonomous marketing agents for small and medium-sized businesses, has successfully closed a $9 million seed funding round. This landmark development in AI funding news places Gushwork firmly among the most promising names in the emerging AI-powered marketing landscape. The round was led by Susquehanna Asia VC, a prominent venture capital firm known for backing high-conviction technology bets across Asia and the United States.

The announcement, made on February 26, 2026, marks a significant milestone not just for Gushwork, but also for the broader Indian AI startup ecosystem that continues to attract serious global investment. With this fresh infusion, Gushwork's total capital raised climbs to $11 million — a figure that reflects both investor confidence and the startup's ability to demonstrate measurable early results in a highly competitive space. For those tracking the trajectory of AI funding in India, this deal stands as compelling evidence that agentic AI solutions, particularly those tailored for SMB marketing, are emerging as a strong category for institutional capital.

A Powerful Investor Consortium Backs the Vision

One of the most telling aspects of this AI funding round is the quality and diversity of investors involved. While Susquehanna Asia VC led the deal, the round also saw meaningful participation from a well-respected cohort of existing investors — including Lightspeed, B Capital, Seaborne Capital, Beenext, Sparrow Capital, and 2.2 Capital. The presence of Lightspeed and B Capital, in particular, adds a layer of credibility that goes well beyond the dollar figure. These are firms that have consistently backed category-defining companies, and their continued commitment to Gushwork in this round signals strong conviction in the company's product direction and market thesis.

Rahul Taneja, Partner at Lightspeed, articulated this confidence clearly. He noted that Gushwork embodies the shift toward AI-first business discovery, with agents that continuously generate qualified leads with minimal input from customers. His view is that the team, having spent years building AI products, has both the experience and the vision to transform growth journeys for businesses around the world. Such strong endorsement from a partner at one of the world's leading venture firms underscores the seriousness with which the investment community is treating AI-powered marketing infrastructure. This is AI funding news that deserves attention not just from the startup community, but from every business owner trying to understand where marketing is headed.

What Gushwork Actually Does — And Why It Matters

To understand why this round matters, it is important to understand what Gushwork AI has built. Founded in 2023 by Nayrhit Bhattacharya and Adithya Venkatesh, the company builds autonomous AI marketing agents that help businesses get discovered and cited on AI search engines — platforms like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, and Perplexity. The key insight driving Gushwork's product philosophy is that buyer behaviour has fundamentally changed. People are no longer beginning their vendor research journey on Google alone. Instead, they are opening AI tools and typing questions like "which software should I use for project management" or "what is the best accounting tool for a small business." The companies that appear in those AI-generated answers are the ones that win the customer.

Gushwork's autonomous agents are specifically designed to ensure that its clients' businesses are the ones being cited and recommended when such queries are asked. The startup claims that 80% of its customers see up to a 500% spike in website impressions and a 50% increase in inbound leads within just 60 days of deploying their platform — numbers that, if sustained, would represent an extraordinary return on investment for any small or medium-sized business. To put the scale of the opportunity in perspective, Gushwork has cited OpenAI data indicating that ChatGPT alone now handles over 2.5 billion prompts per day. That means there are billions of daily opportunities for a business to either be discovered or completely missed — and Gushwork is building the infrastructure to make sure its clients are on the right side of that equation.​

Adithya Venkatesh, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at the company, shed light on a fascinating trend that his team has been observing. He pointed out that for every single human visit to their customers' websites, they are now seeing two to three visits from AI agents. These AI agents are crawling, evaluating, and citing content when responding to user queries. This means that modern business websites need to be built and optimised not just for human visitors, but also for AI visitors. The entire notion of digital marketing and SEO is being rewritten, and Gushwork is positioning itself right at the forefront of that redefinition.​

The Plan for the Fresh Capital

With $9 million now in the bank, Gushwork has outlined a clear and ambitious roadmap for how it intends to deploy the capital. Nayrhit Bhattacharya, CEO and co-founder of the company, was candid about the priorities in a statement made on the day of the announcement. He explained that the primary focus will be on building out the AI stack further. The company currently uses a combination of third-party models — including Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT — alongside proprietary models it has developed internally. Investing in improving the accuracy and reliability of these models is a top priority, and that requires significant spend on hiring top-tier engineers and product managers.

Beyond talent acquisition, Gushwork also plans to scale its go-to-market operations significantly. At the time of the funding round, the company had approximately 70 employees based in Bengaluru, with a presence in the United States — its largest market in terms of client base. Bhattacharya shared that the team intends to grow to between 150 and 200 people within the next six months. On the customer front, the company currently serves over 300 businesses globally, with an additional 800 companies on its waitlist. The goal is to reach 1,500 paying customers within the next six months — a nearly fivefold increase that will require both product excellence and aggressive sales and marketing execution. These are the kinds of growth targets that explain why AI funding of this magnitude is necessary and, more importantly, how it will be put to work.

The company offers three different service tiers for businesses — Launch, Grow, and Scale — providing flexibility for companies at different stages of growth to benefit from its agentic platform. This tiered approach also ensures that Gushwork can serve a wide range of SMBs without being locked into a single customer profile. The US market currently dominates in terms of client volume, but the company's Bengaluru roots and India operations signal that it is building for a global audience from day one.​

The Bigger Picture: AI Is Reshaping How Businesses Are Found

The implications of Gushwork's rise extend well beyond one startup's funding story. This is a signal of a broader, irreversible shift in the landscape of digital marketing and business discovery. For decades, Google search has been the primary channel through which businesses reached potential customers online. SEO — search engine optimisation — became an entire industry worth tens of billions of dollars, built on the premise that ranking higher in Google results meant more customers, more leads, and more revenue. That foundation is now being challenged in a fundamental way.​

AI search engines are rapidly becoming the first point of contact between buyers and the businesses they ultimately choose to work with. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity are not just answering factual questions — they are increasingly being used to research vendors, compare tools, evaluate services, and make purchasing decisions. The businesses that understand this shift and actively optimise for AI visibility will have a decisive competitive advantage over those that do not. Gushwork's $9 million round is, in many ways, a bet that this shift is not just beginning — it is already well underway.​

The $80-billion digital marketing and SEO industry is entering a phase of disruption, and companies like Gushwork are leading the charge. The idea that a business website must now be optimised for AI crawlers and AI citation — not just Google bots — represents a new paradigm that will force marketers, business owners, and technology vendors to rethink their entire strategy. As AI models continue to improve and become even more integrated into everyday consumer behaviour, the companies that have built their infrastructure around AI-first discovery will find themselves in an extraordinary position. Gushwork's latest round of AI funding is a strong indicator that at least some of the world's smartest investors believe that moment has already arrived.

At The AI World, we closely track developments at the intersection of artificial intelligence and business transformation. This latest round from Gushwork is another reminder that the AI revolution is not just about large language models or enterprise software — it is fundamentally changing how businesses grow, how customers discover products, and how capital flows toward the companies building the tools of tomorrow. As AI funding news continues to pour in from across the startup ecosystem, Gushwork's story stands out as one worth watching closely in the months and years ahead.