Cloud

Automation Hero raises $15.5 million to help companies automate repetitive processes


SalesHero, a platform that meshes robotic process automation (RPA) with artificial intelligence (AI) to help businesses automate repetitive software-based processes, has raised $15.5 million in a series A round of funding led by Atomico, with participation from Baidu Ventures and Cherry Ventures. The San Francisco-based startup also announced that it is now called Automation Hero — a name-change that reflects its renewed focus beyond sales teams.

This takes Automation Hero’s total amount raised to $19 million, following its $4.5 million seed round last April, and Atomico principle Ben Blume will now join Automation Hero’s board of directors.

While it may not be the sexiest concept to emerge from the technology sphere, RPA is becoming a key driving force behind companies’ attempts to optimize their workflows through automation and machine learning. In a nutshell, RPA involves installing software that sits on top of a company’s own applications to observe what an employee does at the user interface level — the software then records these repetitive clicks and can automate this process 24/7 (if required). In terms of specific use cases, well, it could be anything from continuously extracting data from LinkedIn into a customer relationship management (CRM) database, completing and submitting web forms, and interacting with any kind of application.

The benefits to RPA are three-fold: it reduces human errors due to fatigue, allows employees to focus on more fulfilling tasks, and improves a business’s overall efficiency.

Judging by recent investment patterns, RPA technology is red hot — in the past six months alone, a slew of RPA investments have come to fruition. UiPath raised $225 million from major investors such as Alphabet’s CapitalG, Sequoia, and Accel at a $3 billion valuation; Softomotive nabbed $25 million; Automation Anywhere secured $300 million from SoftBank’s Vision Fund; FortressIQ attracted $12 million; Intel Capital led a $30 million investment in Catalytic; and Kryon bagged $40 million.

Intelligent automation

As with some of its peers, Automation Hero is not selling itself strictly as an RPA platform — it’s very much stressing the importance of its AI in terms of enhancing the RPA functionality, which is known in the industry as intelligent process automation (IPA). However, many of the big names in the RPA realm first started developing their systems more than a decade ago — Automation Hero’s pitch is that its platform was built from the get-go with AI and machine learning at its heart.

Through its Flow Studio application, users can create advanced automations through “point-and-click” connectors, with so-called “click robots” extracting data from any user interface (web or desktop application).

Above: Automation Hero: Flow Studio

Elsewhere, the AI Studio enables users to create their own deep learning AI models through Tensorflow, covering natural language processing (NLP), recommendation, classification, personalization, and more. Again, no coding is required.

Above: Automation Hero: AI Studio

Automation Hero personifies some of its automation smarts through an AI assistant called Robin, which can help “augment” sales teams’ decision making.

Robin sends a daily email to each user, featuring a list of potential tasks for the assistant to automate — this can be set up so that it’s entirely autonomous, or it can also be configured so that a human’s final approval is required.

Citing one real-life example, Automation Hero noted that one of its clients developed an AI model built on the behavior patterns of its sales reps who have previously reacted to customers’ “event triggers” to up-sell or cross-sell new products. As such, Robin may be used to suggest potential new sales opportunities to follow up on.

Above: Automation Hero: Robin

The Automation Hero platform can  be used to automate countless other tasks within an organization. For example, it can read and understand inbound emails using NLP, and organize meetings by suggesting dates — if the external party can’t attend any of the suggested dates, Automation Hero responds with alternatives.

“Automation is the enterprise AI killer use case,” noted Automation Hero founder Stefan Groschupf, “however the decade-old RPA technology out there has only slapped on AI – calling Cloud AI APIs or OCR tools. Given our experience, we have built an enterprise-ready AI automation platform from the ground up.”

Beyond sales

Groschupf has a long and distinguished history in the big data and machine learning sphere. He was one of the early contributors to Apache Nutch, the open source web crawler software project that preceded Hadoop. More recently, Groschupf founded a VC-backed big data analysis company called Datameer in 2009. Datameer’s founding chief technology officer (CTO) Peter Voss also recently jumped ship to join Groschupf at Automation Hero.

Automation Hero, which counts a team of 20 split between its San Francisco headquarters and Berlin, Germany, said that it will use its fresh cash injection to spearhead its global growth. And although sales teams will continue to be a core focus, armed with a new name it will be better positioned to sell its wares to many different departments, such as finance and HR.

“Our customers were actually seeing value beyond just their sales teams so we decided we didn’t want to lock ourselves into just the sales organization,” Groschupf told VentureBeat. “Repetitive and manual processes plague departments across an organization, although sales organizations tend to see immediate ROI [return on investment] as they are heavily process driven.”

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