We're excited to announce our $240,000 seed investment in Gumnut.

Gumnut is co-founded by product owner Owen Brasier and technical lead Sam Thorogood. This B2B DevTools startup is ready to transform how we collaborate on web apps, driven by a profound belief that the web, in its current state, is fundamentally stuck.

“The first time Sam pitched us his vision for Gumnut we were hooked.  Building native collaboration into any product, especially in the age of AI agents, we believe is vitally important. We're excited and feel privileged to be backing this exceptionally technical team, Sam and Owen, on this journey.”
- James Alexander, Founder Galileo Ventures

‍The Future of AI DevTools - What we see

In an era where collaboration is paramount, editing remains an afterthought: it’s a static, isolated experience for most businesses, despite the idea of rich collaboration being a well-understood feature in major products like Google Docs.

Gumnut is here to challenge this outdated paradigm, democratisating this feature for every SaaS, adding collaboration and AI to all your forms or input methods. With a simple integration, add collaboration with your colleagues—as well as with configurable and customisable AI agents who can assist your users to be the best they can be.

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Why We Care and Why We Decided to Back Gumnut

While Owen and Sam have different background stories, both felt frustrated with the status quo of the web.

After spending years at Google, both on collaboration products and DevTools, Sam’s various CTO and consulting roles revealed to him the real lack of innovation in the way SaaS products are built. The vision of Gumnut came naturally: everyone is trying to do the same but ‘easier/faster’, and no-one is reinventing the way we write B2B software.

Owen came to Gumnut as a co-founder PM, having most recently worked with content management systems that were off-the-shelf but stuck “in the 90s”: we dress them up, but the principles of building software hasn’t changed. And these systems made it trivial at Owen’s last company for end-users to accidentally nuke each other’s changes, plus were impossible to attribute who did what, and important changes of sensitive data wasn't attributed.

"Gumnut has that rare mix of developer simplicity and genius functionality. We were super impressed with both Owen and Sam and their deep product knowledge and ability to create a product that developers would find useful, a tough thing to do in this era of dev tooling abundance."
- Hugh Stephens, Co-Founder Galileo Ventures

The Why Now Moment

When the team pitched us the idea the first thing we asked is, 'why hasn't anyone done this before?'. After all Google Docs has native collaboration built in.

Sam explains, "The zeitgeist and how people interact with the web is particularly ‘sticky’. Frameworks like Bootstrap, Tailwind, and now Next.JS and so on tend to create “samey” experiences and we need to give the web a concrete push to move it into its next era: for us, that’s the real-time everywhere, collaborative era where users expect to see a cursor, rather than are surprised by it."

After further discussion with the team we couldn't agree more. For us it was one of those lightbulb moments where we could see a different way developers could build collaboration natively in their products.

"Interestingly, and perhaps because it is a new type of UX, we’ve found that the average end-user expects an “infinite canvas” experience (e.g., Miro, Excalidraw) to be collaborative. Gumnut can also power these experiences, but the real goal is that the ye-olde average SaaS form, everyone has them, will be pushed into the 21st century as well."

The Long Game

Gumnut's core philosophy is that editing should not be an afterthought and an awkward extension of your product’s backend database, and that it can be elevated to be a seamless and collaborative experience, which is incredibly important for B2B tools. Sam asks, "when your company says “users can work together”, what does that really mean? If you can’t see each others’ cursors and actively build on each other’s shoulders, we believe that the definition falls short."

We believe that the zeitgeist of the web should move forward. The needle on the perception that collaboration is ‘hard’, or ‘special’, or “only available for those big utilities” is something that no-one has made serious efforts to fix, and we believe this is what Gumnut can change.

We believe that we will create a new modus operandi for the web: we want to change the entire web’s perception of the way users interact with each other and AI inside SaaS products."

As an early stage startup, Gumnut is focusing on a core offering that enhances your existing choices, "if your SaaS is stagnant, if you want to differentiate, if you want to actually enable true collaboration, if you want a new type of vessel for delivering AI-assistants: we are here for you, without costly rewrites. Our experience as seasoned engineers working on DevTools has given us the confidence to do this right and to “go where our users are”."

For us as investors we also see the bigger goal: we see Gumnut as a complete platform, one that will usher in a new era of the way software is built. It’s one that rethinks and challenges what it means to use a database, and to work together, and to achieve your business’ specific goals. "We’re not building a future that’s just a simpler way to get started with “classic” primitives—we’re on a mission to reinvent the primitives." ✨

The Impact

The Gumnut team strongly believe collaboration shouldn’t be something that only the big players can do, it will be something that everyone expects. Not just in your Google or your Notion or your Figma. "Every end-user of B2B SaaS will open their forms and be surprised when they can’t type with their colleagues on the same page. Users will be surprised when they’re not able to quickly pull up old versions of data, or attribute exactly who typed what, and when."

"Gumnut is not more ‘complex’ than what’s come before. We’ve taken the best research and thought about how it should be realised into a DevTools product that actually delivers real, differentiated value for our customers who want to up the ante and deliver easier, better experiences for your users, all while actually writing less code."

The Future of Work: With AI Agents

Another aspect that excites us is how Gumnut delivers a novel way of working with AIs: agents – agents that can type and work immediately alongside you, who understand structured data, and can be tasked to deliver whatever makes the most sense for your application.

"When AI can type alongside you, it’s more of a collaborator than a prompter. Instead of treating it as a synchronous process where you must prompt it with Q+A, we can enable it to work as a colleague and collaborator. And because Gumnut can attribute that work, you can still look at its contributions and decide they don’t make sense, or rewrite it yourself with active back and forth with the task. It can adapt as you build something together."

Gumnut is paving the way for a new way to build online products in the AI era, and at Galileo we're excited to back them on the journey.