SAN FRANCISCO, May 13, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ChampAI, which automates the browser workflows, phone calls and document processing that consume enterprise ops teams, today announced its emergence from stealth alongside an $8.5 million funding round led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from defy.vc, SV Angel, and a group of prominent industry angels including Max Mullen and JJ Zhuang.
Operations teams in key industries like healthcare are stuck in a bygone era, executing labor-intensive, manual tasks including processes such as navigating 6 browser tabs at the same time, re-inputting data from faxed PDFs, and calling providers to wait on hold for several minutes before having any meaningful dialogue.
Champ’s platform propels enterprises into the modern AI-era, closing the gap for enterprises between wanting to implement AI and actually executing it. Champ’s platform identifies which time-sucking processes can be automated and then designs, refines, and executes end-to-end workflows using AI agents across multiple mediums including, browsers, documents and phone calls to enable organizations to scale without adding headcount.
“Enterprises are eager to adopt AI, but often overlook the most costly, highest-impact opportunities,” said Jagannath Putrevu, co-founder and CEO of Champ AI. “Operations teams spend their days navigating fragmented systems that weren't built to integrate and so much of this work still gets pushed to BPOs. With Champ's AI agents, Ops teams can finally automate these workflows in-house and reduce their dependence on BPOs.”
Founded by Jagannath Putrevu, Ted Cheng, and Peter Lin, Champ is led by a team that spent nearly a decade at Instacart, helping scale it from Series B to IPO. They built and deployed AI systems across logistics, consumer, and enterprise products, tackling many of the challenges Champ addresses today: turning complex, fast-changing rules into scalable workflows. At their peak, the systems they designed supported over a million daily orders across 4,000+ retailers, powering billions in revenue and giving them rare, firsthand experience in operationalizing AI at enterprise scale.
"The RPA market is massive and LLMs have completely changed both what can be automated and who has the ability to do it. At the same time, the space is becoming crowded and we wanted to be deliberate about where we placed our bet” said lead investor and Redpoint Partner Urvashi Barooah. “What sets Champ apart is the depth of its team. Jagannath, Ted, and Peter spent nearly a decade together scaling Instacart's operations to over a million daily orders, and every backchannel we ran gave us conviction this is the team to win this market.”
Champ addresses the challenges of modern operations teams with a platform that:
- Identifies high-impact automation opportunities across back-office operations
- Handles unstructured, judgment-intensive work across browser, document, and voice environments
- Orchestrates workflows across multiple modalities in a single system
- Enables non-technical teams to build and manage workflows through a self-serve AI copilot
- Monitors workflows to identify gaps and flag improvements
By combining workflow discovery, orchestration, and execution into a single platform, Champ enables organizations to move from experimentation to measurable outcomes and unlock faster growth, lower operational costs, and more scalable teams.
"Champ AI sped up our card processing by 30%, said Alan Bailey, Director of Operations at Arena Club, the online marketplace for buyers and sellers of sports and entertainment cards. “They’ve been a reliable, responsive partner every step of the way."
The company will use the new funding to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams, accelerate product development, and deepen its presence across key verticals.
"AI adoption has often stalled because companies know the promise, but not how to scale automation for complex workflows,” said Medha Agarwal, General Partner at defy.vc. “Champ stands out by helping enterprises identify, build, and run multimodal workflows end-to-end — it's a single platform that handles phone calls, document processing, and browser tasks, covering everything an operations team touches in a given day. We're excited to back the team as they build the future of operational software.”
About Champ AI
Champ AI is building the system of record for operational workflows. By combining AI-driven workflow discovery with agent-based execution, Champ enables organizations across key industries such as insurance, healthcare, finance, and logistics to design, run, and optimize internal processes—without adding headcount.
CONTACT
Jake Katz
Outvox
jkatz@outvox.com
