Tonkean: Robotic Automation Company To Invest In Strategic Growth With New Funding Round

By Amit Chowdhry ● Nov 5, 2019
  • Tonkean, a leading robotic automation and management platform for business operations, announced it raised $7.2 million in a seed round of funding led by Foundation Capital

Tonkean — a leading robotic automation and management platform for business operations — announced recently that it raised a $7.2 million seed round of funding led by Foundation Capital with participation from Magma Venture Partners and Slow Ventures for solving the last-mile challenge in business operations. Foundation Capital partner Joanne Chen is joining the board of directors in conjunction with the funding round.

What does Tonkean do? Tonkean brings human-in-the-loop robotic automation to enterprises. And as an operating system for operations teams, Tonkean empowers business and functional operations managers to deploy custom bots without any code or development expertise.

Currently, employees only spend an average of 2.8 hours a day on high-value work mainly due to the manual tasks and distractions from having to use too many systems and interfaces. And the increase in specialized teams and processes has also made cross-functional coordination more challenging.

This also leads to tremendous drag on business operations that negatively impacts revenue, operating costs, and customer experience. And the momentum in robotic process automation (RPA) has demonstrated an appetite from enterprises to address inefficiencies through automation. But the lack of focus on people in designing processes with automation has left a gap in realized impact.

And by taking a people-first approach to automation, Tonkean launched the next generation of robotic automation and helps automate processes end-to-end by bridging the gap between systems and people.

By utilizing context-aware automation, AI-driven people coordination, and more than 1,000 system connectors, Tonkean automates the administrative tasks and coordination work associated with business processes like updating records, moving data between systems, or following up with people on action items and projects.

Tonkean bots partner with people by intelligently reaching out to them in their platforms of choice to simplify work and ensures that people do not become the bottleneck in business processes.

“Tonkean is a strategic part of our business operations, giving us the flexibility to scale processes while meeting our constantly evolving needs,” added Stefanie Layne, VP and Chief of Staff at TripActions. “While we started off with automating customer support workflows, we are now beginning to leverage Tonkean to automate processes in multiple areas like people operations, IT, and strategic services.”

The Tonkean platform essentially drives higher revenue, efficiency gains, and improved customer experience with use cases across enterprise functions. And front-office processes such as customer support triaging or lead qualification can be fully automated by connecting multiple systems and coordinating between customer-touching teams.

Back-office processes such as legal request intake can be fully delegated to a Tonkean bot, which consolidates requests from across the business, auto-handles the responses, intelligently route items to different teams, and provides visibility into critical KPIs.

And Tonkean has also built out a growing technology partner portfolio including DocuSign, Zendesk, Intercom, Front, and many others.

Tonkean enables them to better connect and tailor their product workflows to each customer’s unique environment and needs. Plus Tonkean extends the value that software providers can deliver.

“The need to simplify and automate processes in modern-day enterprises is undeniable, and this is not just a systems problem,” explained Chen. “The talented team at Tonkean has introduced the next generation of automation that incorporates the unique attributes and behaviors of people.”

This round of funding will support Tonkean’s strategic growth and hiring initiatives along with the continued development of its robotic automation and management platform.

“We are excited to have top-tier investment funds like Foundation, Magma and Slow joining us as we continue our mission of improving the way we work through automation,” added Sagi, “and we are incredibly thankful to have the support of all of our early customers and advisors, as well as individuals like Sam Lessin, Kevin Mahaffey, Yuval Neeman, and others, that helped us throughout our journey.”