Ex-Instacart Engineers Raise $8.5M for AI Operations Automation Startup

Vc and SV Angel. The startup was founded last year by Jagannath Putrevu, Ted Cheng and Peter Lin after nearly a decade as engineers at Instacart. Jagannath Putrevu is the cofounder and CEO of Champ AI.

He said the experience at Instacart showed how scaling a company can create overwhelming back-office demands. "We've seen firsthand how operations teams deal with lots of manual processes and really struggle as a company scales," Putrevu told Business Insider. There were orders to fix, store hours to update, fraud issues to investigate, and customer-support policies to follow.

Champ AI has more than 10 paying customers across logistics, healthcare, and e-commerce, Putrevu said. The company was founded to automate that work for other companies. Putrevu said Champ is not designed to replace operations teams.

Companies still need people to own processes, monitor agents, and manage their performance. 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.

Business Insider reported that the founders learned a painful lesson at Instacart: scaling a company can mean drowning in back-office busywork. The three engineers spent nearly a decade there before starting Champ AI last year to address those operational challenges.