Gushwork raises $9 million to automate AI search marketing

On Thursday, Gushwork announced it has raised $9 million in a seed round—an early-stage financing round—led by Susquehanna International Group and Lightspeed. The financing values the startup at $33 million post-money, which is an increase from its previous valuation of about $7.5 million. That earlier valuation followed a $2.1 million pre-seed funding round in July 2023. The latest round, which also saw participation from B Capital, Seaborne Capital, Beenext, Sparrow Capital, and 2.2 Capital, brings Gushwork’s total funding to $11 million.

Founded in 2023 by Nayrhit Bhattacharya and Adithya Venkatesh, the startup initially focused on helping small and medium businesses outsource workflows. “When we started, we were focused on helping businesses outsource faster and outsource better,” Bhattacharya said. However, the company pivoted to focus on AI-driven search marketing after seeing strong customer demand for online visibility. Today, Gushwork’s platform uses automated agents to generate search-optimized content and build backlinks—typically 10 to 20 per customer—through a network of roughly 200 to 300 partner websites.

The startup has signed up more than 300 paying customers, with subscriptions starting at $800 per month. While roughly 95% of Gushwork’s customer base is located in the U.S., its operations are supported by a team of about 70 employees in India. According to Bhattacharya, the company’s recent traction metrics include:

• Annualized Recurring Revenue (ARR): The company is running at about $1.5 million in ARR—a metric representing the annualized value of recurring revenue—after rolling out its AI search-focused product around three months ago.
• Target ARR: Gushwork is targeting $3 million to $3.5 million ARR in the next three months.
• Growth Rate: The startup is growing about 50% to 80% month over month.
• Lead Generation: While about 20% of website traffic across its customer base comes from AI-driven search and chat platforms, those channels account for around 40% of inbound leads.

Gushwork plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering team, improve model accuracy, and scale its go-to-market efforts. The startup currently has more than 800 businesses on its waitlist. This expansion comes as AI-driven discovery platforms gain momentum globally. For context, OpenAI reported in July 2025 that ChatGPT received about 2.5 billion prompts a day globally, including roughly 330 million prompts from U.S. users.

Why it matters

Gushwork is betting that the shift toward AI-driven search and discovery creates a new opportunity to help businesses surface in these channels using its automated marketing agents, with early traction drawing investor support.