(L-R) Nayrhit Bhattacharya and Adithya Venkatesh, founders, Gushwork.Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) marketing startup Gushwork has raised $9 million in a funding round led by Susquehanna Asia VC, with participation from Lightspeed, B Capital, Seaborne Capital, Beenext, Sparrow Capital, and 2.2 Capital. The round takes the company’s total funding to $11 million.
Founded in 2023 by Nayrhit Bhattacharya and Adithya Venkatesh, the startup builds autonomous AI marketing agents that help businesses get discovered on AI search engines such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. The company said that over 300 businesses globally use its platform, with another 800 on its waitlist. Gushwork’s agents ensure business websites get recommended when buyers ask questions on these platforms.
The fresh capital will be used to accelerate product development, improve the accuracy of its AI agents, expand engineering teams, and scale go-to-market operations.
Gushwork is positioning itself at the intersection of marketing and generative AI (GenAI), as buyers increasingly turn to AI search engines to research vendors and products. Citing OpenAI data, the company said ChatGPT alone handles more than 2.5 billion prompts per day, signalling a shift in how businesses are discovered online.
“It’s similar to the early 2000s when everyone was trying to understand SEO for Google. We are trying to imagine how marketing and growth will look in an AI-first world and help small and mid-sized businesses generate customers and leads from AI search,” Bhattacharya told ET. He added that most of its customers are US-based and are in high-ticket B2B segments.
The startup believes that by 2028, AI’s recommendations will be the primary way buyers choose their vendors.
“On average, by month three or four, a customer starts seeing about 10-15 qualified sales inquiries per month. That usually comes from roughly 100,000-200,000 impressions across the content we create. Out of those inquiries, typically three to four convert, which translates to approximately $30,000–$50,000 in return on investment (RoI) of $1,500-$2,000 per month,” Bhattacharya explained.
The startup claims that 80 per cent of its customers see up to a 500 per cent spike in website impressions and a 50 per cent increase in inbound leads within 60 days of deployment.
“For every human visit, we are seeing 2x-3x AI agent visits on our customer websites. A website today needs to attract AI visitors as well, because they analyse and cite content when answering potential customers’ questions,” said Adithya Venkatesh, cofounder and chief product officer. “Our technical moat lies in understanding how different AI engines evaluate authority and decide what to cite.”
Sai Araveti, investment advisor at Susquehanna Asia VC, said AI search represents a new discovery channel for businesses. “What excited us about Gushwork is that they’re building the system that owns how a business shows up across every AI engine, end to end, from understanding what AI models look for, to creating the content, to continuously adapting as these models evolve every few weeks,” said Araveti.
Rahul Taneja, partner at Lightspeed, added that Gushwork reflects a shift toward outcome-driven AI tools. “Businesses seek results, not additional tools to manage. Gushwork’s agentic platform has the potential to transform growth journeys globally,” he said.
Currently, Gushwork operates on a subscription model. Pricing ranges from $800 to $2,500 per month, depending on the number of pages created and managed. In the future, it will add a performance-linked variable pricing component alongside subscriptions.
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