Workato makes headlines after raising $110 million to accelerate a new category: Integration-led Automation
On January 12th, Workato, a leading Enterprise-level Integration and Automation Platform, announced it has raised $110 million from Altimeter Capital and Insight Partners, bringing total capital raised to $221 million and a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion.
Silicon Valley Business Journal calls this Salesforce competitor “Silicon Valley’s newest unicorn” being that it enables both business and IT to integrate their apps, automate business workflows, and drive real-time outcomes from business events.
Moreover, Workato has established a whole new category entirely; Integration-led Automation, intended to automate and unify core operating organizational workflows, applications, data, and teams. The company has reimagined customizable automation formulas with a simplified and approachable flavor. Workato ‘Recipes’ are no-code/low-code automations plainly described in conversational style, allowing non-technical users close to the problems to quickly automate. In the same breath, the tool supports complex enterprise workflows with scalability, security, and governance in mind. Users have the flexibility to create their own automations or select from thousands of ready-to-use recipes spanning business essential categories like Customer Service, Finance and Accounting, HR, Operations, Sales and Marketing, and more.
This comes at a time in which organizations across the globe feel pressure from COVID-19 to retool procedurally and pivot strategically to meet market demands. Workato co-founder and CEO Vijay Tella said in a statement “Real digital transformation is not just about building a new website or letting employees chat on video. It’s about transforming the very core of how you run your business.”
Tella elaborates his view that “you need one platform that captures all your data, business processes, and UX so you can ‘see” holistically what is happening, troubleshoot it, and fix it quickly.” This level of business transformation has always been “very hard and much too slow”, Tella says, due to:
- Companies are drowning in fragmented data, business processes and UX
- The apps alone aren’t enough
- These core operating flows need an integrated approach to data automation, process and UX.
With this significant additional capital, the company’s initial funding directive is to support customer success, further platform development, drive Workato’s Automation Institute and establish international data centers. This will certainly interest the thousands of businesses who currently utilize the platform, including Coupa Visa, Carfax, Intuit, Box, Slack, Panera Bread, and according to VentureBeat, add to the “200% growth in new partners since 2019, working with Adobe, Snowflake, Workplace by Facebook, and more.”
