Workato, a Cupertino-based intelligent integration and automation platform, announced that it has completed $25 million in Series B funding from Battery Ventures, Storm Ventures, ServiceNow, and Workday Ventures. Workato has now raised $41 million total. With this funding round, it means that Workato is the only company to have raised funding from three of the largest software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies: Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday.
“We are enabling a new era of automation where, for the first time, employees are empowered to access critical information from across their cloud and legacy systems. Not only to streamline their business operations, but also to make them intelligent with AI and ML,” said Workato chief executive Vijay Tella. “We are excited by the support from our customers, partners, and investors as we work to make this future a reality.”
Companies know that automation is necessary for developing smarter and more connected customer and employee experiences, but they struggle to implement these systems due to divides between business and IT teams.
And with the growth of many different SaaS companies, the data fragmentation of apps adds more problems. According to data from McAfee, the average enterprise uses 1,935 applications.
What Workato does is provide companies with a single platform that IT and business teams can use for integrating data across cloud and legacy apps, automate full business processes, and deploy artificial intelligence and machine learning powered bots. Workato grew over 300% in 2017 and it is used by more than 3,500 customers across 57 countries.
“Today, every business is becoming a digital business, and automation and new digital workflows play a key role in enabling that data-driven future,” added Battery Ventures general partner Neeraj Agrawal. “We are excited to partner with Vijay and the rest of the Workato team to help businesses more efficiently manage data, applications and other advanced workflows—and make that digital future a reality.”
Workato connects to a number of systems and users can set up actions that can be activated under certain conditions just like IFTTT. These actions are controlled using a drag-and-drop interface.
“Workato provides a solid glimpse into the future of work – a single platform that can be used to automate work across the organization quickly and effectively – helping to create more seamless worker experiences,” explained Workday Ventures senior vice president, corporate strategy, managing director and co-head Leighanne Levensaler. “We’re excited to increase our investment in the platform as it continues to help our customers transform their businesses.”
The company is also launching a new artificial intelligence feature called Automation Editions, which benefits sales, marketing, and human resources teams. According to TechCrunch, editions for finance and support will be coming in the future.
