AI agents hold great promise, with some claiming they will revolutionize the workplace itself.

But they can be a bit conceptual and businesses don’t always know where to start.

Year-old startup CrewAI has quickly become one of the most popular AI agent frameworks – it’s used by AI pioneer Andrew Ng, among many other top companies – because it simplifies the creation and deployment of multi-agent systems.

Today, the company is launching its first – and highly anticipated – product to market, CrewAI Enterprise. The platform, which has been in beta for a few months, allows users to create, deploy and iterate on multi-agent “teams”. The company also announces an $18 million fundraising round.

CrewAI founder and CEO João Moura called the opportunity for AI agents “huge.”

“The AI ​​agent is currently an LLM that doesn’t need to be part of the conversations,” he told VentureBeat. “Instead of a conversation, you give him a task, and he has the opportunity to decide independently what to do and when to do it.”

“The simpler the better,” open source review

According to Markets and Markets, the AI ​​agent industry will grow dramatically over the next five years, from $5 billion this year to nearly $50 billion by 2030. Capgemini reports that 10% of large Companies are already using AI agents, and more than half are considering doing so. will use them next year and 82% will adopt them in the next three years.

“Agents are the big thing everyone is talking about right now,” Moura said. “The genie doesn’t go back in the bottle. People want this to happen.

CrewAI, which was just founded in 2023, has already established itself as one of the most popular agent frameworks, competing with Langraph and Autogen. Moura noted that companies are moving more and more quickly from designing AI agents to use cases.

“What we’re noticing is that companies are graduating much faster than expected,” he said.

The company’s new platform builds on its popular open source framework and allows organizations to build teams of AI agents using any large language model (LLM) or cloud platform. Users can plan and build multi-agent systems; deploy these agents securely in a production environment with custom levels of access and control; and iterate and track ROI with testing and training tools.

When starting out with AI agents, “the simpler the better,” Moura said. That’s what sets CrewAI apart, he said; they also “doubled down” on educating people.

“This is a whole new category and a whole new market,” he said. “People are trying to figure out how they should go about it, they want to be educated. He noted of other competing projects: “It’s almost like they’re intentionally trying to make things complex.”

CrewAI also has strong open source traction. The company has a “very opinionated” view of how agents work. Open source plays a huge role in how the world creates software, Moura noted, and is an “incredible distribution channel.”

“The world is open source, all software uses open source libraries,” he said. “We don’t want to be in a world where all the models are closed, where you don’t know what’s going on, where you’re locked in with all these suppliers.”

Use cases for internal marketing processes

Moura highlighted a “wide range of use cases” for agentic AI as a whole and called CrewAI’s offering “such a cross-functional product.”

The most common use cases are for internal automations, marketing and coding, he noted. Agents can perform research, summaries and reports, and can also contribute to legal analysis.

For example, a Fortune 500 customer with consumer-facing products was looking to update their existing projects and applications (including Java and SAP). They were able to create agents that could update and test the code themselves before submitting it for final review by a human engineer. They save hundreds of thousands of dollars (by their own estimate), Moura said.

“Marketing is another interesting area,” he pointed out. Agents can develop leads by interacting with vast sources of instant information. Or, in the case of real estate companies, agents can monitor markets, generate leads, and advise agents on purchasing or rental scenarios.

Moura highlighted a large beverage company that used CrewAI to create agents that could handle internal requests from a portal accessible by thousands of employees. A series of very specific rules must be reviewed before internal requests can be approved, Moura explained; agents understand and review these rules, respond to requests (whether or not they have been approved or if more information is needed). Robotic process automation (RPA) systems then take over to transfer the information stored in the company’s database.

Getting even more complex, Moura said CrewAI’s platform has been used by a large media company that has refined models to act like movie directors: They can cut frames and add subtitles and music, then automatically broadcast them on social networks.

“People are always on the cutting edge of technology,” Moura said.

Millions of agents, significant traction among the Fortune 500

CrewAI’s open source platform runs more than 10 million agents per month, and the company says it’s already used by nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies. It has signed its first 150 beta enterprise customers in less than six months.

“I have to say it’s been crazy. I think we are one of the fastest growing projects,” Moura said. “It’s very intense and very humiliating.”

Crew AI’s seed round was led by Bold Ventures, and its Series A round was led by Insight Partners. Additional funding comes from Blitzscaling Ventures, Craft Ventures, Earl Gray Capital, and several high-profile angel investors, including Ng and Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot.

Ng noted in a statement: “CrewAI makes it easier and faster to develop simple and complex multi-agent AI workflows. Its powerful enterprise-grade orchestration features, including memory and self-healing, help businesses go far beyond traditional automation.