- Robotic Process Automation (RPA) company Robocorp announced it has raised $5.6 million in its first round of institutional funding led by Benchmark
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) company Robocorp has been quietly building open-source tools and a cloud-native platform over the last year. The company has a goal of making RPA more easily accessible to any company rather than just major corporations that benefit from it now. And Robocorp has been operating in private closed beta since May.
Recently, Robocorp announced it raised $5.6 million in its first round of institutional funding led by Benchmark with participation from Slow Ventures, firstminute Capital, Bret Taylor (President and Chief Product Officer of Salesforce and co-creator of Google Maps), and Rob Bearden (CEO of Docker). Peter Fenton of Benchmark is joining Robocorp’s board of directors in conjunction with the funding round.
Robocorp is led by CEO Antti Karjalainen — who previously worked as the director of intelligent automation solutions at Siili Solutions in Finland. The founding team also includes CTO Teppo Koskinen, VP of Engineering Sampo Ahokas, and Chairman Jouko Ahvenainen.
With this round of funding, Robocorp is planning to accelerate growth. And the company is taking the next steps towards democratizing RPA.
“The RPA industry has seen incredible growth in just the past 2-3 years, with large corporations already benefiting from the automation of millions of routine business tasks, ranging from onboarding new employees to processing insurance claims. But for all the benefits RPA has brought to businesses, it has only been able to help a sliver of the market due to the prohibitively high costs associated with these proprietary tools and the lack of a proper developer ecosystem,” said Robocorp in a blog post. “At Robocorp, we see massive potential for RPA to help every business. And that’s why we have spent the past 10 months building a solution from the ground up that, for the first time, reimagines RPA as open-source tool with a cloud-native orchestration platform. Our Robocloud platform is the first cloud-native solution for RPA orchestration, making it instant to deploy and scale, which is impossible with the legacy RPA offerings today. And by leveraging open-source tools, we aim to create an entire open ecosystem to effectively do for RPA what Github did for software development collaboration.”
Several months ago, Robocorp launched its first pilot program with ten leading consulting and system integrator partners across finance, transportation, logistics, and several other high-impact industries. By working with these partners combined with the funding round, it will prepare Robocorp to set up a public product launch in the coming year.
Companies are currently looking to gain efficiency and reduce costs by outsourcing functions to low-cost regions around the world. And in the near future, Robocorp believes that this work will be conducted by robot developers who will automate the work in-house instead. Outsourcing work to robots will be a driving force for increasing efficiency, reducing errors, improving employee satisfaction, and delivering better customer experiences.
As Robocorp is developing an open-source standard for RPA, it means that smaller companies will be able to afford to robosource their work. And there will be hundreds of thousands of developers that share their work online and can offer their services to customize workflows from readily available components.
One of Robocorp’s bank customers moved a customer service task to Robocloud. And within one month, they were able to save 1,369 years of customer waiting time, out of which 7 years was active waiting time where a person would have been on the phone with the bank’s representative.
With this round of funding, Robocorp is expanding its operations by tripling the workforce for scaling the vision of an open-source RPA ecosystem by creating tools that developers around the world will use to automate tasks.
