Startup Deep Dive : SuperAGI — the open-source AI project that raised the funding, a marketing tool pays the bills

SuperAGI’s open-source agent framework carries more than 17,700 stars on GitHub and helped its Palo Alto- and Bengaluru-based maker raise money from a venture firm backed by WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum. Yet the company’s most established line of revenue traces back two years earlier, to a marketing-automation tool called Contlo that the same two founders built to solve a far narrower problem: getting e-commerce brands to send better emails.

That tool is now folded in and rebranded SuperAGI Marketing, and it is still the product with the longest paying-customer list. The move from single-purpose SaaS to a self-described “full-stack AGI platform” is the story of two engineers who once ran logistics at Zomato and product at Navi, and who rebuilt the same company under a bigger name each time the market moved.

Quick facts

What they do

SuperAGI sells software that lets other businesses run AI “agents” instead of hiring people for repetitive sales, marketing and support work. Under one brand it now houses three products built at different times for different customers: SuperSales, an outbound sales tool that researches prospects and updates CRM records automatically; SuperAGI Marketing, the renamed Contlo, which runs email, SMS, WhatsApp and web-push campaigns for e-commerce and direct-to-consumer brands; and Verk, pitched as an “AI employee” that can be assigned sales, design, research or social-media tasks. Underneath all three sits an open-source framework, released publicly in 2023, that lets developers build and run their own autonomous agents rather than buy SuperAGI’s finished apps.

The origin

Ishaan Bhola and Mukunda NS had already built one company together before SuperAGI existed. Bhola had worked in product at Sachin Bansal’s fintech startup Navi; Mukunda had spent over a decade in engineering, including as a co-founder and VP of engineering at logistics firm Runnr before its acquisition by Zomato, where he later helped scale a delivery platform handling more than a million orders a day, as per his own professional profile. In October 2021 the two of them started Contlo, betting that D2C brands needed one AI-driven dashboard for customer messaging instead of five disconnected tools. The insight was narrow and provable: Contlo told investors its AI-first approach drove three times more revenue than generic marketing tools, a company claim rather than an audited figure, and used it to sign up more than 500 e-commerce brands within its first year, as reported by Entrackr in January 2022.

The bigger idea came later, once large language models made “autonomous agents” a live research topic through 2023. Rather than treat agents as a feature to bolt onto Contlo, the founders spun up a second, open-source project under a new name — SuperAGI — aimed at the underlying infrastructure problem: giving any developer, not just their own customers, a framework to build and run agents.

The struggle years

Contlo’s early funding came in small, cautious steps that suggest a business proving itself round by round rather than one riding a hype wave. It raised $800,000 in pre-seed funding in January 2022, led by Better Capital with Titan Capital participating, explicitly earmarked for hiring and go-to-market rather than expansion, according to Entrackr and w.media’s coverage of the round. Eleven months later, in December 2022, it raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Kae Capital, with Better Capital, Titan Capital and a group of Indian founder-angels — including Mamaearth’s Varun Alagh and Razorpay’s Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar — putting in money, as reported by The SaaS News. Two funding rounds inside thirteen months, each modest by Indian SaaS standards, is not the pattern of a company that had already found its ceiling; it is the pattern of one still negotiating for runway.

The bigger strain was strategic rather than financial. Building a horizontal marketing tool for e-commerce brands meant competing directly with far larger, better-capitalised platforms such as Klaviyo, MoEngage and WebEngage — a fight Contlo was never going to win purely on feature count. By 2023, instead of raising a larger round to keep scaling Contlo as a stand-alone company, the founders open-sourced a completely separate agent framework and let Contlo become one application inside a bigger platform, later rebranding it SuperAGI Marketing altogether. Effectively, the company that had spent two years and $4.3 million convincing investors it deserved to exist as “Contlo” chose to retire that identity rather than keep fighting for it under its own name.

The turning point

The open-source SuperAGI framework launched publicly in 2023 and reached number one on Product Hunt with 820 upvotes on 4 August 2023, according to the project’s own Product Hunt listing, and became a trending repository on GitHub around the same period. That visibility is what changed the company’s fundraising conversation. Seven months later, on 11 March 2024, TechCrunch reported that Newlands VC — the low-profile firm run by WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum out of Dallas — was leading a $10 million Series A into SuperAGI, with participation from existing backer Kae Capital and a group of AI researchers and operators from Meta and Apple. The same report put SuperAGI’s total funding at roughly $15 million and its valuation at “sub-$100 million,” a figure independently corroborated by funding tracker SPEEDA Edge. On one side of that turning point sat a two-year-old marketing SaaS company with $4.3 million raised across two rounds; on the other sat an AI infrastructure company that had just tripled its lifetime funding in a single round, on the strength of a free product that made the company no direct revenue at all.

The money behind it

• Pre-seed, January 2022 (as Contlo): $800,000, led by Better Capital with Titan Capital participating — used for hiring and initial go-to-market, per Entrackr.
• Seed, December 2022 (as Contlo): $3.5 million, led by Kae Capital, with Better Capital, Titan Capital and founder-angels including Mamaearth’s Varun Alagh and Razorpay’s Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, per The SaaS News.
• Series A, 11 March 2024 (as SuperAGI): $10 million, led by Newlands VC (Jan Koum’s firm), with Kae Capital and individual AI researchers/operators from Meta and Apple, per TechCrunch.
• Total disclosed funding: roughly $15 million across the three rounds above, per TechCrunch’s March 2024 report — equivalent to about ₹96 crore for the Series A tranche alone at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 (18 September 2026, Trading Economics).
• Reported valuation: “sub-$100 million” at the March 2024 Series A, stated by TechCrunch and separately described as “valuation below USD 100 million” by SPEEDA Edge — no newer valuation has been disclosed since.
• What each backer changed: Better Capital and Titan Capital funded Contlo’s initial product-market search in e-commerce; Kae Capital stayed on across the Contlo-to-SuperAGI transition, giving continuity through the pivot; Newlands VC’s Series A, and its Meta/Apple-linked angel investors, is what funded the shift from a single SaaS app to a broader agent platform and open-source push.

How it makes money

Money comes in from three paid products sitting on top of one free one. SuperSales and SuperAGI Marketing are sold as subscription software — SuperSales is listed from $75 a month on its public pricing page — billed to the business using the tool, not to the end customer the agents interact with. Verk follows the same subscription logic, priced around the tasks or “roles” an AI agent is assigned rather than seats. None of the three publish a take rate or usage-based fee on top of the base subscription, which sets SuperAGI apart from agent platforms that charge per action or per API call.

The open-source framework itself is free, and that is deliberate: it is a distribution and credibility engine, not a revenue line. A developer who builds on the free framework becomes a warm lead for the company’s cloud and paid tools; TechCrunch reported roughly 20,000 developers, including people at Microsoft, Google, Tencent, Tesla, JPMorgan Chase and OpenAI, already using SuperAGI’s released tools as of March 2024 — a company-stated figure, not independently audited. Costs sit mainly in engineering headcount and the compute needed to run agents and maintain two open-source models the company has released, SAM-7B and VEagle; margin, as with most agent-layer software, depends on how much of that inference cost SuperAGI absorbs versus passes through in its subscription price, a detail the company has not published. The part outsiders most often get wrong, per critical reviews on Glassdoor and G2, is assuming the free, widely-starred open-source project is the business; the subscription apps built on top of it, not the framework, are what SuperAGI actually charges for.

The numbers

SuperAGI has not published audited revenue or profit-and-loss figures, and its Indian subsidiary’s financial statements — filed for the year ended 31 March 2024 — are not publicly viewable without a paid registry subscription, per Tofler and TheCompanyCheck. The only revenue and headcount figures in public circulation come from Latka, an independent SaaS-tracking firm that publishes unaudited, self-reported estimates. They are presented below as estimates, not filings, with profit/loss left blank because no figure — audited or otherwise — has surfaced anywhere.

The direction, at least, is consistent across both third-party trackers: headcount nearly doubled from 53 to roughly 90 people between December 2024 and June 2025, and the estimated annualised revenue figure moved from Contlo’s standalone $7.1 million in 2024 to a combined $9.9 million by mid-2025 — growth, on these unaudited numbers, but not the step-change that “AGI platform” branding might suggest.

Where the money comes from

• SuperAGI Marketing (formerly Contlo): the oldest paid line, serving e-commerce and D2C brands; reported over 500 brands at its January 2022 pre-seed and over 1,000 e-commerce customers by the time of the December 2022 seed round, per Entrackr and The SaaS News.
• SuperSales: the newer outbound-sales product, built around a claimed database of 275 million-plus contacts and 75 million-plus companies (company-stated, not independently verified), priced from $75/month on its public pricing page.
• Verk: the “AI employee” line for sales, design, research and social-media tasks, part of the roughly 1,000 combined paid customers TechCrunch reported across Contlo and Verk as of March 2024.
• Open-source framework and models (SAM-7B, VEagle): free, contributing zero direct revenue but driving the 20,000-plus developer base and 17,700-plus GitHub stars that underpin the company’s fundraising narrative.
• Geography: engineering and a large share of headcount sit in Bengaluru, India, while the legal headquarters and the venture narrative are built around Palo Alto, California — a dual-base structure the founders also used at Contlo, which was registered in both Bengaluru and Newark, Delaware, per Entrackr’s 2022 report.

The surprise, given the “AGI” name, is how conventional the actual money is: it comes from selling marketing and sales software subscriptions to mid-sized e-commerce and B2B companies, the same customer profile Contlo chased in 2021, rather than from anything resembling general intelligence licensing.

The risks

• Unpatched security flaws in the flagship open-source project: security researchers disclosed at least three authorization-bypass vulnerabilities in the SuperAGI framework (up to version 0.0.14) in 2026 — CVE-2026-6613, CVE-2026-6584 and CVE-2026-6585 — allowing an authenticated attacker to delete or modify other users’ agents; SentinelOne’s vulnerability database recorded that the vendor had not responded to disclosure attempts or shipped a patch as of the CVE’s publication. A widely-starred but seemingly under-maintained open-source flagship is a reputational risk for a company whose paid products sit on the same brand.
• Concentration in a single vertical: the best-documented customer base — over 1,000 accounts — still sits in e-commerce marketing automation, the market Contlo originally built for; expansion into sales (SuperSales) and general “AI employee” tasks (Verk) is newer and has no independently disclosed customer or revenue numbers of its own.
• Employee and customer sentiment gaps: public reviews flag concerns about product-market fit and account-management responsiveness even after Series A funding, per employee commentary referenced in aggregated Glassdoor review summaries — a pattern that, if it persists, undercuts the retention story a subscription business depends on.

The takeaway

The lesson in SuperAGI’s path is not that open source is a bad business model — it never was meant to be one here. It is that the flashiest, most fundable version of a company and the version that actually pays its bills can be two different products wearing the same logo, and founders who accept that early can keep both alive at once instead of betting the whole company on the one that is winning the headlines this year.

Frequently asked questions

What does SuperAGI actually sell?

Three subscription products — SuperSales, SuperAGI Marketing and Verk — built for sales, marketing and general task automation, plus a free open-source framework for developers who want to build their own AI agents.

Is SuperAGI the same company as Contlo?

Yes. Contlo was founded in October 2021 by Ishaan Bhola and Mukunda NS as a stand-alone marketing-automation company; it was later folded into SuperAGI and rebranded SuperAGI Marketing once the founders launched the broader agent platform in 2023.

Who founded SuperAGI and what did they do before?

Ishaan Bhola, now CEO, previously worked in product at Navi; Mukunda NS spent over a decade in engineering roles including at Runnr (acquired by Zomato) and Zomato itself, according to his professional profile. Public company databases show no record of either founder having co-founded Slintel or 6sense; 6sense’s own newsroom credits that company to a different founding team.

How much money has SuperAGI raised, and what is it worth?

Across a pre-seed, seed and Series A round (the earlier two as Contlo), the company has raised roughly $15 million in total, most recently a $10 million Series A led by Newlands VC in March 2024, at a valuation TechCrunch and SPEEDA Edge both described as under $100 million. No later valuation has been publicly reported.

Is the open-source SuperAGI framework safe to run in production?

Security researchers disclosed multiple unpatched authorization-bypass vulnerabilities in versions up to 0.0.14 in 2026, with no vendor response recorded at time of disclosure, according to SentinelOne’s vulnerability database — worth weighing before deploying the framework on production data.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• TechCrunch (syndicated via Yahoo Finance), “SuperAGI snags funding from WhatsApp founder Jan Koum’s secretive Newlands VC,” March 2024
• SPEEDA Edge, SuperAGI Series A funding update, March 2024
• Entrackr, “SaaS startup Contlo raises $800K pre-seed round,” January 2022
• The SaaS News, “Contlo Raises $3.5 Million in Seed Round,” December 2022
• Kae Capital, SuperAGI investment profile, accessed September 2026
• GetLatka, SuperAGI and Contlo revenue/headcount estimates, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, Super AGI company and funding profile, accessed September 2026
• Tofler / TheCompanyCheck, Superagi Workshop Private Limited registry filings, accessed September 2026
• GitHub, TransformerOptimus/SuperAGI repository, accessed September 2026
• Product Hunt, SuperAGI Cloud launch listing, August 2023
• SentinelOne Vulnerability Database, CVE-2026-6613, disclosed April 2026
• 6sense newsroom, “6sense Acquires Slintel,” October 2021 (used to verify founder history)

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