A comprehensive look into the enterprise software automation space
OpenOcean's automation database represents the wider enterprise software automation space as a whole. In the map we've gathered more than 700 automation companies with a valuation over $100M, as well as the most exciting early-stage startups in this area, to give you a view on what is going on, who are the players to know, and which technologies are taking off.
The wider software automation space in the context of this map means all solutions that help enterprises automate previously manual and repetitive workflows. This includes identifying new automation opportunities, creating and/ managing in-house built automation workflows, and “ready-made” solutions to automate several workflows in a specific corporate function or a vertical.
The size of each ball visualizes the number of companies in this category. You can find more information about the category and companies inside of it by selecting one of the balls.
We hope you enjoy the map and learn something new about this exciting space!
Nina Gunell, Investment Associate
Tom Henriksson, General Partner
ps. Since we have worked hard to define a map with precise coordinates, you might disagree with a company’s category, or you might think that an important category is missing. That’s why we’ve again made this map interactive: Submit your suggestions here, and we’ll consider adding them to the map!
* Please note that to get the best experience of the visualisations, view this on your computer.
This is where most automation journeys should start, but it is very seldom the case. Process and tasks mining technologies are often used to analyze the operational processes based on event logs, turning event data into insights. This an invaluable way to expedite the understanding of both problem and outcome, which is essential for automation success. A recent report by Forrester found that 61% of exec decision-makers will use or are evaluating using process mining to simplify operations. The challenge with traditional process mining has been, and still is, that it takes quite much time and effort to get results that improve operations.
Key players and trends in the market: As of today Celonis is still dominating the category, indicated by the ability to attract >90% of all VC/PE funding in this space. Celonis has educated the market and paved the way for many new players, and has now also become an active acquirer in this space - the latest being Process Analytics Factory in March, 2022. Process intelligence solution provider FortressIQ was acquired by RPA giant AutomationAnywhere to speed up planning and implementation of automation. New upcomers to look out for in this space include Mimica, which discovers desktop worker processes by mining screenshots, clicks and keystroke data, and Workfellow’s self-serve solution analyzing digital work in real-time and automatically giving insights on how to improve business operations.
Conversational AI, which is based on NLP and NLG, have made chatbots, voicebots and virtual assistants a commodity. Traditionally, conversational AI has been used to provide information in customer-facing operations. What is mainly hindering the development in this area is the fear enterprises have of utilizing truly dynamic and intelligent AI - a lot of answers are still based on rules built by humans. The sheer number of vendors in conversational AI is huge - Gartner mentions more than 2000 vendors, out of which more than 1000 are VC:s majority owned.
Key players and trends in the market: Compared to last year, we see large investments in vendors which are transactional instead of purely informational - Kore.ai (raised $70M in 2021) and Uniphore (raised $400M in 2021) are examples of this. Our expectation is that conversational AI will in the future be used as a front-end for self-service, enabling consumers e.g. to get a pre-filled loan offer from their bank. Another trend is to use conversational AI within a company, to e.g. provide transactional HR services. This is a great opportunity for vendors to demonstrate the capabilities of their conversational AI in a safe environment - if employees start trusting the intelligent chatbot for their internal operations, they should soon also be ready to move away from rule-based solutions in the customer-facing operations.
What unites companies in this subcategory, is that the automation is done using a desktop UI - either on an end-user's desktop or more typically on a virtual machine. Workflows are built in an intuitive no-code platform, which typically doesn’t require any developer skills. According to Gartner, RPA remains the fastest growing category in enterprise software, with more than 60 software vendors now part of the RPA landscape and revenues expected to surpass $2 billion in 2021.
Key players and trends in the market: Talking about RPA in 2021, you cannot ignore UiPath’s incredible $38 billion IPO in April 2021. UiPath also acquired Cloud Elements, an API integration platform, which enables 200 new native integrations, as well as enables the triggering of an automation workflow based on the occurrence of an event. Needing to make an acquisition to achieve the latter capability showcases quite clearly that UiPath, despite being the global leader in RPA, still needs lots of development to be the true intelligent E2E automation platform they desire to be. Another interesting acquisition in this space was Automation Anywhere buying the process intelligence company FortressIQ, which will enable their customers to do process discovery to identify new automation opportunities. When looking forward, we expect these big RPA vendors to continue broadening their offerings - mainly through acquisitions. There will also soon likely be a pricing shift towards consumption-based pricing of software robots, driven by Microsoft Power Automate and new RPA players with lower price points, unlocking RPA solutions also for small- and medium-sized organizations.
Note: Although UiPath and Automation Anywhere are part of the E2E automation player category, we have decided to include them in this analysis since they are also the leaders in RPA.
Optical character recognition can identify and collect relevant information from e.g. an email, image or PDF. By using NLP for a specific language, the output can be further validated. Intelligent document processing then represents the full process, from handling an incoming document up until giving the desired output, which can then be forwarded to another software (e.g. an expense handling solution).
Key players and trends in the market: Driven by the pandemic there is now, in addition to the market leader ABBYY, a second unicorn in this space: the intelligent document processing tool Hyperscience (raised $100M in 2021). Immediately after the round, Hyperscience strengthened their solution further through the acquisition of Boxplot, which provides a graph data modeling tool that enables organizations to visualize and better understand their own data. Despite UiPath having their own OCR solution, both ABBYY and Hyperscience are also available in the UiPath marketplace. One potential trend in this market is that pure API based OCR vendors will start replacing the use of general open source tools like Tesseract and GOCR. The early-stage company Mindee, which is used for example by Spendesk in their expense handling solution, is one of the potential candidates for this.
Today, two-way API connections are practically a must have for almost all new software solutions. iPaaS platforms remove the need for each company to start from scratch in building these data pipelines, providing a ready-made integration from place A to B.
Key players and trends in the market: The three biggest players all had investment rounds in 2021. Sequoia invested in Zapier at a 5B$ valuation, Workato raised $200M and Airbyte raised $176M. The first two players are not pure iPaaS providers, but are also enabling the creation of similar no-code automation workflows as RPA vendors. Airbyte, which was founded in 2020, is on the other hand disrupting the ETL market through their open source approach. In less than two years, they have caught up with existing ETL providers in the number of connectors provided (+150 as of today, mostly built by the community). By running these connectors in Docker containers, they have also been able to disrupt the existing pricing models with a much lower price point. Another new trend we see in the market are reverse ETL providers, where data pipelines are built out from data warehouses back to applications. Technically this is very different from ETL, and until 2018, there were no vendors providing this solution. These new reverse ETL vendors, Census (raised $16 M in 2021, $60M in 2022), Hightouch (raised 51 M in 2021), Weld ($5M in 2021), are definitely companies to look out for in the future.
Traditionally, BPM platforms have been a place to store visual descriptions of key manual workflows in an organization, e.g. in the form of a decision tree. Documenting this type of workflows is intuitively value adding, since it allows standardization across the workforce and eases onboarding of new employees. BPMs have however never really taken off, despite BMPs being around since the beginning of the 2000s, and there have never been any unicorn level companies in this space. The main problem lies in the huge workload to create all the manual workflows and keep these up-to-date, since most BPM solutions are not used on a daily basis. Therefore our assumption is that enterprises mainly use BPM for a share of all the workflows within an organization, which greatly reduces the value which can be achieved by these.
Key players and trends in the market: The new era of BPM tools, also called iBPM tools, go further to provide collaboration opportunities and integrations to other softwares. One of the biggest players Processmaker (raised $45 M in 2021) is taking it even a step further by also providing RPA workflows. At the heart of it, Processmaker is still a BPM tool, which is why we included it in this subcategory. The overall takeaway is that the line between vendors in iBPMs, orchestration and iPaaS is becoming more blurry. In this market map we do however want to examine these separately, since they fundamentally are coming from different angles to solve similar problems.
Orchestration can be thought of as the middle ground between traditional BPM and iPaaS, taking the best of both worlds to create a platform for managing all automation building blocks in one single platform. The vision of Gartner, which we also share, is that a majority of intelligent automation solutions will in the future be managed via one orchestration platform, where you can manage and operate the best of breed solution for each step in an automation workflow.
Key players and trends in the market: The largest player is Camunda, which raised a $98M B-round from Insight Partners, perhaps indicating that this is the least mature of all the subcategories examined. The reason for e.g. Zapier not being considered within orchestration today, is that they don’t allow the use of other RPA bots for a specific automation step. If they would change this, they could potentially be considered also an orchestration player. In the future, there is expected to be tight competition between existing big RPA vendors and new upcoming orchestration players to win the overall intelligent orchestration game - everybody wants to be at the core managing all other automation. A very early player to watch out for in orchestration is RPA Supervisor, which today only focuses on RPA run-time optimization, but their future vision is to become one of the first full-scale orchestration platforms.
ION Group
Investors
Developer of mission-critical trading and workflow automation software designed for financial institutions, corporations, central banks and governments. The company's proprietary platform provides fixed income traders with an integrated view of global electronic, fixed income, derivatives and futures markets through a powerful, user-friendly interface and offers advanced trading functionality along with tools for system administration and real-time monitoring, enabling clients to automate the full trade lifecycle and maximizing access to liquidity.
HelpSystems
Investors
Developer of IT management software, designed to automate business and IT processes. The company's automation software helps to manage repetitive tasks, and centralized job scheduling through robotic process automation for the desktop easy for any user, along with document management software that helps companies go paperless by digitally managing the entire lifecycle of their documents and data, helping businesses increase operational efficiency, reduce downtime, and streamline mission-critical IT and business processes.
UiPath (NYS: PATH)
Investors
UiPath Inc creates an end-to-end platform that provides automation with user emulation at its core. Its platform is built to be used by employees throughout a company and to address a wide variety of use cases, from simple tasks to long-running, complex business processes. It generates revenue from the sale of licenses for its proprietary software, maintenance and support, and professional services. It generates a majority of the revenues from the US, followed by Romania and the rest of the world.
Applied Systems
Investors
Developer of cloud-based insurance software designed for the insurance industry. The company specializes in insurance automation software for agency and brokerage management systems that automate the exchange of information and data throughout the insurance life cycle between agencies, brokerages, carriers and their clients, enabling clients to have greater access to information and streamlining workflows.
Infoblox
Investors
Developer of network infrastructure automation and security software designed to control and secure the networks from the core. The company's actionable network intelligence helps organizations, ranging from enterprises and governments to service provider customers in protecting against the rising flood of malware and cyberattacks that target networks, overcoming the complexity by creating a single point of control across traditional data centers as well as public and private cloud deployments, enabling them to increase efficiency and visibility, improve customer service and meet compliance requirements.
Celonis
Investors
Developer of an execution management system designed to analyze and optimize digital business processes intended to serve production, human resources and logistics industries. The company offers unique process mining software systems for increased productivity and automated management consultancy that can be used for all business processes, enabling clients and businesses to improve process transparency and efficiency.
HashiCorp (NAS: HCP)
Investors
HashiCorp Inc is engaged in solving the infrastructure challenges of cloud adoption by enabling an operating model that unlocks the full potential of modern public and private clouds. Its cloud operating model provides consistent workflows and a standardized approach to automate the processes involved in delivering applications in the cloud: infrastructure provisioning, security, networking, and application deployment. Its main commercial products are Terraform, Vault, Consul, and Nomad.
Momenta
Investors
Developer of artificial intelligent systems for autonomous driving designed to improve efficiency of driving. The company's technology offers autonomous driving solutions through big data, model optimization platforms, perception development, path planning algorithms, and other deep-learning software. This enables clients to live a better life through improved safety and efficiency of driving through artificial intelligence.
Bombardier Transportation
Investors
Provider of railway technology based in Berlin, Germany. The company digital technologies like driver assistance safety systems, alternative propulsion, predictive maintenance or high-performance signaling technology to increase safety efforts and improve overall service for passengers developing and deliver innovative mobility solutions that advance economic growth.
Automation Anywhere
Investors
Developer of AI-based robotic process automation software designed to augment the human workforce by automating repetitive business processes. The company provides a platform for building and executing software bots powered by artificial intelligence and is trained to automate complex business processes involving any application, enabling businesses to reduce operational costs and error rates.
SpotOn
Investors
Developer of a cloud-based financial platform designed to help to build a better future for the business. The company's platform offers several comprehensive tools including payments, point-of-sale, custom websites, appointments, marketing, reviews, analytics and loyalty with a consistent communication strategy by importing existing customer lists, enabling merchants to boost efficiency, and connect with their customers and make crucial business decisions.
Olive
Investors
Developer of process automation software designed to build meaningful artificial intelligence that empowers and scales humans. The company's software acts as a router between systems and data by automating repetitive, high-volume tasks and workflows to eliminate denials for no coverage as well as improve cash collections, enabling healthcare organizations to improve efficiency and patient care while reducing costly administrative errors.
Uniphore
Investors
Developer of an artificial intelligence-powered conversational automation platform designed to offer speech analytics. The company's platform helps machines to understand and respond to natural human speech, enabling businesses to use natural communication modes and speech so as to engage and instruct machines and thereby build loyalty and realize efficiencies.
Rippling
Investors
Provider of an employee management platform intended to help eliminate the administrative work of running a company. The company's platform helps to manage employee data and operations including onboarding, offboarding, payrolls, tax forms, email accounts, and keycard access, enabling companies to onboard new employees seamlessly.
Zeta Global (NYS: ZETA)
Investors
Zeta Global Holdings Corp is an omnichannel data-driven cloud platform that provides enterprises with consumer intelligence and marketing automation software. It serves enterprise customers across multiple industries, including financial services, insurance, telecommunications, automotive, travel and hospitality, and retail.
Tricentis
Investors
Developer of software testing tools designed to accelerate business software delivery and testing. The company's tools consist of unique model-based test automation and test case design approach, encompassing risk-based testing, test data management, provisioning and service virtualization, enabling IT businesses and developers to deliver significant performance improvements to testing projects.
Coveo (TSE: CVO)
Investors
Coveo Solutions Inc is an AI-powered platform. It provides applied AI solutions enabling enterprises to deliver relevant digital experiences at scale. The company's solutions provide value to its customers by helping drive revenue growth, reduce customer support costs, increase customer satisfaction and website engagement, and improve employee proficiency and satisfaction.
Tipalti
Investors
Provider of a cloud-based automation platform designed to eliminate mass payment workload and reduce automation payment risk. The company's platform helps in eliminating financial and compliance risk, generating revenue from accounts payable, cutting payment reconciliation cycle time, and improving supplier relationships, enabling CFOs (Chief Financial Officers) to focus on the strategy of scaling their business rather than the minutiae of accounts payable logistics.
WalkMe (NAS: WKME)
Investors
WalkMe Ltd is the defining solution enabling organizations to better realize the value of software investments. It is a cloud-based digital adoption platform, users employees and customers of organizations can navigate websites, SaaS applications, and mobile apps through a digital, GPS-like experience to accomplish any task from simple, online transactions, to complex cross-application software processes, to fully autonomous experiences that require no manual clicks or entries. Substantial revenue is derived from the United States.
Mavenir Systems
Investors
Developer of a multimedia communications and information processing software intended for communication service providers and enterprises. The company offers a cloud-native network software, a mobile communications software stack that runs on cloud infrastructure and connects devices, as well as people to the internet and apps also offer multimedia messaging, operating in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific.
PayFit
Investors
Developer of payroll software designed to automate payroll and human resource (HR) management tasks. The company's software automates the payroll of employees and manages social statements as well as offers a flexible HR system to track and manage working time, onboarding process, leaves and expense reports, enabling small and medium-sized businesses to easily manage payroll and HR information online on a single platform.
Outreach
Investors
Developer of a semiautomated sales engagement platform designed to automate repetitive sales tasks on behalf of coworkers while prioritizing key customer touchpoints. The company's platform uses machine learning to automate and personalize communication, track sales statistics, collaborate with teams, send automated alerts, and assist sales teams to touch all leads, opportunities, and customers with targeting content, enabling companies to increase the volume of sales meetings and create an efficient workflow for salespeople.
MuleSoft
Investors
Developer of a cloud-based application integration platform designed to connect organizational applications, data and devices. The company's platform offers an integration software suite for connecting any application, data source or device using APIs whether in the cloud or on-premises using open-source technology, enabling businesses to re-architect their SOA infrastructure from legacy systems, proprietary platforms and custom integration code to create business agility and gain competitive advantage.
ChargeBee
Investors
Developer of subscription billing and revenue management platform designed to offer subscription management services. The company's platform offers a payment gateway agnostic subscription billing service, that complements gateways as well as powers the recurring revenue engines of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-company (B2C) services across various industries verticals, enabling clients to avail of multiple payment options and making billing easier.
Black Knight (NYS: BKI)
Investors
Black Knight Inc is a technology company that, through its subsidiaries, provides software, data, and analytics solutions to the mortgage and consumer loan, real estate, and capital markets industry. The company's product portfolio includes software solutions to support loan origination, processing and servicing, and data and analytics solutions such as automated valuation models, data integration, risk assessment, among others. Black Knight's business is organized in two segments: software solutions and data/analytics. The majority of revenue comes from the company's software solutions segment, and most of the company's revenue is earned in the United States.
BigPanda
Investors
Operator of an alert correlation platform designed to centralize and correlate enterprise information technology alerts. The company offers a platform of artificial intelligence for IT operations that transforms data into insight and action, enabling operations teams to automate incident management and keep their digital businesses running smoothly and helping in preventing information technology outages and improving incident management.
Workato
Investors
Developer of an enterprise automation platform designed for powerful integrations and automation for ease of use. The company's platform utilizes machine learning and patented technology to make the creation and implementation of automation faster than traditional platforms, thereby enabling business and IT teams to integrate their apps and automate business workflows without compromising security and governance and drive real-time outcomes from business events.
Unqork
Investors
Developer of a no-code application development platform designed to help organizations build custom software. The company's platform helps to build, deploy, and manage complex applications without writing a single line of code and streamlines the product sales process to improve customer experience, enabling clients to build enterprise applications faster, with higher quality, and lower costs than conventional approaches.
Boomi
Investors
Developer of a cloud-based business software intended to eliminate capital costs and the complexities of maintaining software on-premises. The company's software helps to increase revenue, reduce IT spending, elevate customer, partner and employee satisfaction, enabling clients to break down data silos and making integration simple and efficient.
PagerDuty (NYS: PD)
Investors
PagerDuty Inc is a software company that offers on-call management. Its platform harnesses digital signals from virtually any software-enabled system or device, combines it with human response data, and orchestrates teams to take the right actions in real-time. The product offerings of the company include Analytics, Visibility, Event Intelligence, and Modern Incident Response among others.
Asapp
Investors
Developer of a machine learning software designed to make customer experiences more productive. The company's software automates and enhances conversations with customers to close more deals while focusing on complex and data-rich problems, enabling customer care teams, salespeople, and other organizations to be more efficient and effective while realizing their full potential and increasing efficiency.
Omniture
Investors
Provider of online business optimization software. The company hosts and delivers Omniture Online Marketing Suite, as an on-demand solution, as well as an on-premise solution that consists of Open Business Analytics Platform and integrated set of optimization applications for online analytics, channel analytics, visitor acquisition and conversion.
ICE Mortgage technology
Investors
Developer of software products and services designed to be used by mortgage lenders to process mortgage applications. The company's cloud-based platform offers services that include customer relationship management, loan processing, underwriting, compliance and overall enterprise management to the residential mortgage industry, enabling banks, credit unions and mortgage lenders to originate and fund mortgages.
CircleCI
Investors
Developer of a continuous delivery automation platform designed to offer automated testing and continuous integration tools to clients. The company's platform helps to rapidly code for web and mobile applications by automating the build, test, deployment process quickly, safely and at scale, enabling clients to detect and fix bugs before they even reach customers.
Algolia
Investors
Developer of a search and discovery API platform designed to create fast, instant, and relevant search and discovery experiences. The company's platform provides the infrastructure, engine, and tools needed to create fast, relevant consumer-grade search, enabling developers to easily integrate their API to websites and applications and drive consumer engagement.
Zenoti
Investors
Developer of cloud-based enterprise software designed to empower the beauty and wellness industry. The company's software specializes in artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and communication tools to manage reporting and analytics, inventory management, marketing and employee management, enabling businesses to eliminate long front desk lines and have omnichannel booking and contactless payments for seamless check-outs.
Parallels
Investors
Provider of a virtualization and hosting automation platform designed to help in desktop computing. The company's cross-platform software makes it simple to use and access different applications and files on any device or operating system, enabling businesses and individuals to securely and productively use their preferred devices and technology.
Moveworks
Investors
Developer of a cloud-based conversational AI platform designed to solve employees' support issues. The company's platform combines natural language processing, machine learning and semantic search to automate the entire process end-to-end and allows employees to simply describe what they need on their favorite enterprise messaging tool to get help, enabling enterprises to provide instant help to remote and in-office employees.
HyperScience
Investors
Developer of AI-based enterprise software designed to automate office work. The company's software employs machine learning to process structured and semi-structured documents, automate data entry, extract key details from invoices, and reconcile compliance-driven data, enabling businesses to streamline complex processes automatically and increase productivity.
ServiceNow (NYS: NOW)
Investors
ServiceNow Inc provides software solutions to structure and automate various business processes via a SaaS delivery model. The company primarily focuses on the IT function for enterprise customers. ServiceNow began with IT service management (ITSM), expanded within the IT function, and more recently directed its workflow automation logic to functional areas beyond IT, notably customer service, HR service delivery, and security operations. ServiceNow also offers an application development platform as a service (PaaS).
IntelePeer
Investors
Developer of a CPaaS-based cloud platform built to offer on-demand IP communications and SIP trunking services for enterprises. The company delivers communications systems powered with AI and analytics and its omni-channel platform improves customers' communications experience, enabling clients to deliver truly delightful experiences to customers.
Blue Prism
Investors
Blue Prism Group PLC is a UK based software company. It specializes in the field of Robotic process automation (RPA). RPA enables blue-chip companies to create a digital workforce powered by the company's software robots to automate routine back-office clerical tasks. The company's software enables the automation of manual, rules-based, administrative processes to create a more agile, cost-effective and accurate back-office. The group operates across three regions, EMEA, The Americas, APAC and Japan.
Immuta
Investors
Developer of a data management platform designed to automate data governance. The company's platform provides a single, simplified interface to manage and monitor data and connects data from any storage system into a simplified virtual catalog, enabling data scientists to benefit from rapid and personalized data access.
Filevine
Investors
Developer of legal case management software designed to offer text-to-case-file, threaded tasks, auto-tagging, and reports. The company's software offers project management tools and gives security, speed, and reliability, and also assign tasks, upload files, monitor staff productivity, and communicate with their client directly from within their case file, enabling law firms to collaborate on case files with their team and communicate with clients.
N-able Technologies (NYS: NABL)
Investors
N-able Inc empowers managed services providers (MSPs) to help small and medium enterprises navigate the digital evolution. Its flexible technology platform and powerful integrations help MSPs to monitor, manage, and protect their end customer systems, data, and networks. Its portfolio of security, automation, and backup and recovery solutions is built for IT services management professionals. It simplifies complex ecosystems and enables customers to solve their most pressing challenges. The group also provides extensive, proactive support through enriching partner programs, hands-on training, and growth resources to help MSPs deliver exceptional value and achieve success at scale.
SmartHR
Investors
Developer of a cloud HR software designed to help automate social insurance and employment insurance procedures. The company's software lets users fill out an online form and then generate digital versions of pension, employment insurance and other related documents that can be submitted to appropriate offices at the click of a button, enabling businesses to manage and streamline their HR processes.
Electric (IT Consulting and Outsourcing)
Investors
Developer of an automated information technology assistant channel designed to assist businesses to run critical cloud applications and devices. The company's channel offers automated software that provides IT assistance across businesses directly through a real-time chat interface, as well as delivering services like additional system monitoring, management, and insights, enabling small and medium-sized corporate businesses to run enterprise applications smoothly and work efficiently.
Fountain (Human Capital Services)
Investors
Developer of hiring automation software designed to simplify the process of workforce management and hiring. The company's software offers an all-in-one workforce management and hiring system that does background checks and document signing scheduling of independent candidates, enabling companies to quickly screen and hire an independent workforce for their organizations.
