How CrewAI is orchestrating the next generation of AI Agents

When João Moura started building AI Agents, he wasn’t trying to start a business — he was just trying to make his job easier.

He began experimenting during his tenure as director of AI engineering at marketing data platform, Clearbit. “I was trying to build Agents myself,” he recalls. “I was struggling with it, because back then, there were not that many options.”

Moura’s first prototype was more successful than expected: he built a group of AI Agents to automate content creation — specifically to help him post more often on LinkedIn — which resulted in up to 600 new inbound leads a day.

Instead of relying on a single AI tool, multi-Agent systems divide big tasks into smaller sub-tasks, assigning each to a specialized Agent that collaborates with others to reach a shared goal.

The project inspired Moura to build more multi-Agent systems, but doing so involved repetitive coding. “I wanted to automate my life away,” he says. “[But] I don’t want to replicate the same things over and over. So how do I create a system? How do I create tech that allows me to reuse as much of this as I can?”

From code to company

That thought took on life as CrewAI, an Agent orchestration platform that enables customers to build, deploy, and track “crews” of Agents carrying out routine back-office workflows like reporting or onboarding, all from one central dashboard.

“Basically, CrewAI is a platform that allows people to manage all their Agents,” summarizes Moura.

Moura finished building CrewAI in October 2023, before quietly releasing it as an open-source project on GitHub the following month. It quickly gained traction, building a strong community of developers and thousands of users globally, and gathering tens of thousands of GitHub stars.

“We started with an open source framework, so it was very geared toward engineers, technical people, building agents,” Moura says.

But CrewAI stopped being a side project once companies started calling on Moura to take things further. “When you get Oracle calling you and saying, ‘We’re using CrewAI and want to take it to production, can you help us?’ You start thinking, maybe this is … actually a business.”

Building a billion Agents

CrewAI officially launched in January 2024, with Moura as CEO and veteran AI entrepreneur and cofounder Rob Bailey as COO. Within six months, the company had attracted 150 enterprise customers. And by October 2024, Crew AI had raised $18M in funding, including a Series A led by Insight Partners.

The funding coincided with the launch of CrewAI’s enterprise cloud subscription plan: CrewAI Enterprise. Built on top of the company’s open-source framework, the enterprise layer enables teams to plan, build, deploy, monitor, and iterate on AI workloads and multi-Agent systems, as well as build LLM- and cloud-agnostic AI-agent-native features and applications.

“We decided to … build software that bridges that gap so that people can not only build in here, but also optimize and deploy and feel like they’re empowered to actually move super fast on the stack,” Moura explains.

During its first year, the CrewAI team had set itself a goal: build a framework capable of orchestrating a billion autonomous Agents — securely, reliably, and at scale. The company has since surpassed that goal, now powering 1.4B agentic automations across the world’s largest enterprises, including PwC, IBM, Capgemini, and NVIDIA.

“Nowadays, we’re running around 450 million Agents a month,” says Moura. “That is insane if you ask me.”

The agentic AI race

Under pressure from competing AI-powered, business-focused workflow automation products, CrewAI has had to be agile, says Moura. “The only moat in this AI age is speed, so you’ve got to run the company in a way that favors and optimizes for that … If you’re shipping fast, if you’re making decisions fast, you get an edge that other people don’t.”

CrewAI is in a race to build, deploy, and scale faster than anyone else, he explains. “There’s not going to be a world where people are not going to use AI Agents. If anything, people are going to use them more and more.”

“One thing that’s very clear to me is that the genie is not getting back in the bottle.” 

Winning that race is about lowering the friction of adoption: making Agents simple, reliable, reusable, and scalable across an organization. “It needs to be extremely easy to use so anyone can do it,” Moura explains. “If we unlock that, the potential is huge — it’s poised to change the way the workforce exists in today’s market.”

Automating behind the scenes

CrewAI uses its own platform internally, relying on Agents to handle routine workflows and even parts of customer outreach. After every sales call, for example, an Agent automatically creates a personalized demo video, complete with an AI-generated version of Moura explaining the client’s use case.

“The transcript automatically goes to a CrewAI Agent, the Agent selects around three use cases from that call, finds the best one, does deep research … [and] 15 minutes later, a video demo with the use case [is] ready to be sent to the customer,” Moura explains.

Not everyone is so forthcoming. While CrewAI is now used by more than 60% of Fortune 500 companies, “many [companies] just don’t want to be vocal,” Moura says.

He understands the reticence. On the one hand, if a major company were upfront about automating with AI Agents, they could see a stock bump or be seen as progressive. “But at the same time, they’re going to have to face a lot of heat. There’s going to be a lot of questions. They’re going to be giving some intel to the competition. So a lot of them just prefer to do things internally … business as usual.”

Behind the scenes, he adds, these companies are reaping huge efficiency gains — in some cases up to 94%, according to Moura — by automating back-office processes that previously cost millions to run.

Rewriting the future of work

With the global AI Agents market estimated to reach $50.31B by 2030, agentic systems are poised to fundamentally reshape how work gets done. “The way that we work is going to change drastically,” says Moura.

“AI Agents will transform the industry as we know [it].”

CrewAI, expanding into APAC and EMEA, is at the forefront of that transformation, helping organizations move from experimentation to enterprise-scale adoption.

In the years ahead, Moura believes companies will take two paths. Some will use Agents to drive efficiency and reduce costs, while others will use them to unlock entirely new revenue streams. For individuals, the advice is simpler: Adapt early.

“We don’t have as much control as we want to believe we do, unfortunately, but … knowing how to use [these tools] is way better,” he argues. “Get familiar with agents, get familiar with AI, learn how to use them … You’re going to be [doing] yourself a favor in the future.”

*Note: Insight Partners has invested in CrewAI. This article is part of our ScaleUp:AI 2025 Partner Series, highlighting insights from the companies and leaders shaping the future of AI.