After nearly a decade as engineers at Instacart, Champ AI’s founders learned a painful lesson: scaling a company can mean drowning in back-office busywork. Now they’ve raised $8.5 million to build AI agents that automate the work of back-office operations teams.
“We’ve seen firsthand how operations teams deal with lots of manual processes and really struggle as a company scales,” Champ AI cofounder and CEO Jagannath Putrevu told Business Insider. There were orders to fix, store hours to update, fraud issues to investigate, and customer-support policies to follow. Much of that work required operations employees to tediously move between documents, internal systems, forms, and phone calls, he said.
Putrevu and his cofounders, Ted Cheng and Peter Lin, founded Champ AI last year to automate that work for other companies. The startup has come out of stealth with $8.5 million in funding led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from defy.vc and SV Angel. They also secured an angel investment from their former boss, Instacart cofounder Max Mullen.
Champ’s software can turn a company’s internal policies into actions a computer can perform, such as logging into websites, clicking buttons, downloading documents, filling out spreadsheets, sending emails, and making phone calls.
“Our agent is both the brain and the hands, so it decides what needs to be done and then gets it done,” Putrevu said.
Champ AI has more than 10 paying customers across logistics, healthcare, and e-commerce, Putrevu said. Arena Club, a sports and entertainment card marketplace, said using Champ AI has sped up its card-processing work by 30%.
Champ AI is entering a crowded market. It will compete with incumbents such as UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Microsoft Power Automate, as well as a new crop of AI-agent startups tackling browser work and customer support. Champ is also going after work traditionally handled by business outsourcing firms, many of which rely on large overseas teams.
Putrevu said Champ is not designed to replace operations teams. Companies still need people to own processes, monitor agents, and manage their performance. But he said the software can help them avoid spending months getting outsourced teams up to speed and instead keep more operations in-house.
“We already have customers who, whenever they’re thinking of launching a new product, come to us first and set it up on Champ,” Putrevu said, adding that the software helps customers launch products in weeks instead of months.
Champ has six employees and plans to use the funding to hire software engineers, forward-deployed engineers, and salespeople.
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