- Tonkean, an operating system for operations teams, announced it raised $24 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners
Tonkean, an operating system for operations teams, announced it raised $24 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. And Foundation Capital — which led Tonkean’s $7.2 million seed round last year — also joined the round along with Magma Venture Partners and Slow Ventures.
In connection with the funding round, Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Raviraj Jain is joining Tonkean’s board. This funding will be used to introduce Adaptive Business Operations (ABO) software to enterprises.
Operations are known as the foundation of every business. However, the operations functions are often neglected. This is a problem since operations teams now exist across all critical functions such as sales, marketing, customer success, legal, IT, HR, development, product, and finance. And they lack a dedicated platform designed to help them maximize value by creating internal processes that are efficient. So operations teams end up being forced to create manual processes — which leads to employee frustration, constant change management, and endemic business inefficiencies.
Tonkean’s no-code platform now enables operations teams to quickly create adaptive modules to solve their unique challenges in a way that doesn’t require new systems or engineering work. And by utilizing the platform, businesses of all sizes can drive faster SLAs, higher customer satisfaction, and greater efficiency.
As a result, fast-growing startups can adapt more quickly to changing business demands and Fortune 100 enterprises can drive efficiencies with minimal change management.
Operations teams at companies like TripActions, Hopper, Take-Two Interactive, etc. are already utilizing Tonkean to orchestrate a wide range of processes like triaging high-volume support requests, auto-handling routine legal or IT issues, proactively chasing sales opportunity updates, automatically following-up on internal projects, etc. This all comes at a fraction of the cost and time, compared to buying or building software.
With this round of funding, Tonkean will be able to further enable operations teams by investing more heavily in research and development and accelerating go-to-market activities.
Key Quotes:
“The world needs to start thinking differently about how to solve operational challenges. Business processes are about people, not only data. We need to start thinking people-first, as opposed to tech-first. For too long, we’ve subscribed to the ‘there’s an app for that’ approach, but that’s not always the solution you need. In order to create efficiencies in our own businesses’ and people’s unique reality, we need technology to easily adapt to our needs, instead of forcing us to learn a new app.”
“With Tonkean, we’ve seen customers eliminate manual, low-value work for certain processes, like chasing data in internal audits, for example, which amount to over 30% of an entire department’s time. In areas of customer or internal service, they’ve been able to reduce SLAs and turnaround time from 2-3 days down to 3 seconds, without any change of behavior. This, in turn, has massively improved customer retention and accelerated cycles for contracts and sales.”
“We take pride in raising the capabilities and strategic importance of operations teams. The fact that, by utilizing Tonkean, ops teams can deliver solutions to their challenges in mere hours gives them the ability to impact the business in a way that was never possible before.”
-Sagi Eliyahu, co-founder and CEO of Tonkean
“Operational excellence is critical for start-ups and enterprises alike, both as a competitive differentiator in boom years but also as a means of survival in market downturns. Tonkean’s unique, people-centered approach is the key to unlocking the true potential of using technology to drive process efficiency. I’m excited to join Tonkean’s journey to champion the importance of business operations.”
-Raviraj Jain, partner at Lightspeed
“After building up an automation infrastructure anchored around Tonkean, we have been able to service tens of thousands of distressed travelers during the current pandemic by leveraging the platform to expand our messaging capabilities. At Hopper we strike to have a bias for action, and we would not have been as flexible and decisive in these difficult times without Tonkean’s support.”
Nicolas Botero, implementation specialist at travel booking site Hopper
