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.
ScienceLogic
Investors
Developer of a monitoring platform designed to simplify the task of managing information technology resources. The company's platform contextualizes data through relationship mapping and acts on this insight through integration and automation to resolve and predict problems faster in a digital ephemeral world, enabling clients to maximize efficiency, optimize operations and ensure business continuity.
Laiye
Investors
Developer of an automation process platform and intelligent dialogue robot platform based on artificial intelligence technology. The company's robot platform simulates human to perform tasks automatically on the computer, such as processing emails and documents, generating files and reports in large quantities, and entering the CRM system to perform specific tasks, enabling enterprises to increase work efficiency and reduce costs.
Jama Software
Investors
Developer of a requirements management enterprise platform intended to assist create complex products and mission-critical software systems. The company's platform offers a suite that assists the entire product development lifecycle from idea to launch, guiding the strategic and operational aspects of complex product development, enabling businesses to improve product quality, mitigate risk and increase speed to market.
Retool
Investors
Developer of a tool-building platform designed to help in building custom business tools without programming language knowledge. The company's platform creates interfaces to display and manipulate data fast and accurately with custom workflows, enabling businesses to focus on their product and expertise while giving their operation development teams the tools they need to succeed.
Kandji
Investors
Developer of a mobile device management platform designed to remediate security issues and provide granular control over an Apple device fleet. The company's platform offers security, compliance, and reporting software alternatives for Mac computers as well as includes a pre-built library of one-click device controls, enabling users to create custom compliance policies with the help of a library of pre-made templates.
ikaSystems
Investors
Provider of cloud-based software for business automation and process services for the healthcare market. The company provides an enterprise-level platform to support healthcare payers' commercial and Medicare requirements through the automation of sales, marketing, regulatory compliance, claims administration and customer service procedures.
Plex Systems
Investors
Developer of a cloud-based enterprise resource planning platform intended to automate business processes for discrete manufacturers. The company's platform connects suppliers, machines, people, systems and customers with ERP and manufacturing automation capabilities, manages manufacturing operations, keeps accounting and finance system in sync, tracks all program activities and improves inventory accuracy, enabling clients to increase production, improve product quality, gain real-time access to data and run their businesses at maximum efficiency.
Airbyte
Investors
Developer of a data infrastructure platform designed to sync data from applications to warehouses. The company's platform automates data pipelines with pre-built or custom connectors, enabling businesses to gather data analytics from all users including those who use ad-blocking tools.
Puppet
Investors
Developer of an information technology (IT) automation platform designed to address common business challenges. The company offers a wide range of infrastructure automation solutions which includes Application delivery and operations, configuration, compliance, Patch management as well as Windows infrastructure automation, enabling clients to deliver, update, monitor and secure software across physical and virtual machines.
Salesforce (NYS: CRM)
Investors
Salesforce Inc provides enterprise cloud computing solutions. The company offers customer relationship management technology that brings companies and customers together. Its Customer 360 platform helps the group to deliver a single source of truth, connecting customer data across systems, apps, and devices to help companies sell, service, market, and conduct commerce. It also offers Service Cloud for customer support, Marketing Cloud for digital marketing campaigns, Commerce Cloud as an e-commerce engine, the Salesforce Platform, which allows enterprises to build applications, and other solutions, such as MuleSoft for data integration.
ContractPod
Investors
Developer of contract management software designed to assemble, automate, sign, and manage all contracts and documents. The company's software reads, interprets, analyzes, and reports on key contract information, manages full contract workflow and approvals, and automatically set alerts and reminders for important dates, enabling businesses to adapt digital transformation to a more manageable level.
CallMiner
Investors
Developer of a cloud-based customer interaction analytics platform designed to improve contact center performance. The company's platform automatically analyzes contacts across all communication channels such as calls, chats, emails, SMS, surveys, and social, enabling businesses and organizations to gather key business intelligence by automating their ability to listen to every customer interaction.
airSlate
Investors
Operator of a document management platform intended to solve data filling problems in forms. The company's platform helps to create forms, collect signatures, integrate with CRM systems, automating workflows that grew organically by iteratively building features that the customers demanded, enabling clients to improve employee satisfaction, save money and increase revenue.
Motive (Business/Productivity Software)
Investors
Developer of management automation software designed for broadband products and services. The company's software makes complex products and services self-managing, reducing overhead costs and optimizing customers' return on investment, thereby enabling clients to create automated support chains, resulting in reduced costs, improved customer satisfaction, and increased customer loyalty.
Automox
Investors
Developer of a cloud-based patch management platform designed to automate the configuration and maintenance of operating systems. The company's platform offers instant visibility of system inventory, vulnerability status, and policy compliance with complete control and active enforcement of system and software configurations, enabling businesses to see real-time vulnerability status across the entire infrastructure from a single dashboard and take immediate action.
Templafy
Investors
Developer of an enterprise branding and compliance tool designed to create professional documents faster. The company's tool integrates with the existing software used by companies to improve productivity, automate brand compliance and streamline how users create or edit files, enabling users to easily and securely create, manage and share document templates, emails and presentations.
PatientSafe Solutions
Investors
Provider of point-of-care (POC) mobile platform designed to help care teams communicate and work together reliably and efficiently. The company's platform unifies communication with workflow by consolidating text, talk, alerts, EMR data, clinical workflows and customizable care interventions, all in one mobile application and on one device, enabling clinicians to deliver measurable safety and quality improvements.
Justworks
Investors
Developer of a human resource management platform designed to manage employees, payroll, benefits, and compliance procedures. The company's cloud-based software platform gives small and medium-sized businesses access to benefits, payroll, human resources, and compliance support all in one place, and drives economies of scale through co-employment, enabling businesses to get attractive cost savings for customers and provide a richer suite of benefits for employees.
GetSwift (NEOE: GSW)
Investors
GetSwift Technologies Ltd is a technology and service company. It offers a suite of software products and services focused on business and logistics automation, data management and analysis, communications, information security, and infrastructure optimization. It also includes ecommerce and marketplace ordering, workforce management, data analytics and augmentation, business intelligence, cloud communications and others.
BlackLine (NAS: BL)
Investors
BlackLine is a provider of financial and accounting software. The company's products, which help support and automate accounting and financial workflows, include financial close, account reconciliation, intercompany accounting, and control assurance. BlackLine's software seeks to improve the dependability of its clients' financial reporting. BlackLine was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in Los Angeles.
SpringCM
Investors
Provider of a document and contract management platform designed to solve critical business needs. The company's cloud based automated document and contract management platform is tailored to fit business processes with advanced workflows that automate manual tasks and complex processes- shortening contract cycles from weeks to days- enabling businesses to deliver immediate savings and accelerate revenue.
Amber Road
Investors
Amber Road Inc is a provider of cloud-based global trade management solution. Its solution modules and services include import and export management, global sourcing, risk and quality management, production management, transportation management, supply chain visibility, duty management, and professional services. The firm generates revenue from the sale of subscriptions and subscription-related professional services and geographically from the United States.
Nymbus
Investors
Developer of a core banking software designed to transform the way traditional banks and credit unions support and interact with their customers. The company's software is an all-in-one core processing system with a single sign-on combined with a modern user-friendly interface, enabling financial institutions to automate their workflows and upgrade into a digital banking system, evolving with their customers.
MineralTree
Investors
Developer of a cloud-based automation software designed to automate and optimize each phase of an invoice's journey to suit team's existing workflow and specific company needs. The company's software streamlines the payment process by consolidating multiple payment types and integrates with many standard accounting packages, enabling clients to automate their invoice-to-pay process, simplify payments and retain commercial customers.
Elmo Software (ASX: ELO)
Investors
ELMO Software Ltd provides Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud-based Human Resources (HR), payroll and expense management solutions. The business operates in two segments, mid-market through the ELMO platform, and small business through the Breathe platform. The company develops, sells, and implements a range of modular software applications to manage human resource-related processes; recruitment, onboarding, performance management, learning and development, succession planning, and others. It also provides HR core, a software module for people management, and employee self-service.ELMO has business operations in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Geographically, Australia contributes to the majority of total revenue.
Ocrolus
Investors
Developer of a human-in-the-loop fintech infrastructure platform intended to automate back-office tasks with precision. The company's platform uses artificial intelligence and crowdsourcing to automate financial review processes, analyze documents with accuracy and speed, delivering highly accurate data verification, enhanced fraud detection and cash-flow analytics to lenders, enabling financial services companies to make high-quality decisions, in an automated and efficient way, with trusted data.
Camunda
Investors
Developer of process orchestration software designed to offer detailed visibility into business operations across distributed systems. The company's software includes a toolkit for modeling and executing business processes, coupled with visual interfaces for monitoring, troubleshooting active processes and analyzing large volumes of process data, enabling clients to scale and revenue to grow without proportionally increasing operating costs.
Tray.io
Investors
Developer of a general automation platform designed to build and maintain enterprise-wide integrations. The company's platform automates complex processes through a powerful, flexible portal and can connect the entire cloud stack using APIs, enabling developers and IT professionals to use the company's products as a centralized platform without devoting extensive engineering resources to the projects.
nirvanaHealth
Investors
Developer of robotic process automation cloud platform designed to perform core business functions and drive automation. The company combines deep healthcare domain expertise with proven platform-building experience to deploy robotic process automation across the payer and PBM industries, thereby enabling healthcare companies to reduce cost and improve quality across the payer and pharmacy benefit management ecosystems.
Spenmo
Investors
Developer of payment software and technology intended to reduce the admin burden of payments for growing businesses. The company offers an end-to-end payables software that brings internal spend management, corporate cards, automated bill payments, approval workflows, and accounting reconciliation into an integrated view, enabling companies to decentralize spending, digitize their business, and reduce time spent in such processes considerably.
Appian (NAS: APPN)
Investors
Appian Corp provides a low-code software development platform as a service that enables organizations to rapidly develop powerful and unique applications. With its platform, organizations can rapidly and easily design, build and implement powerful, enterprise-grade custom applications through intuitive, visual interface with little or no coding required. The company's customers use applications built on its low-code platform to launch new business lines, automate vital employee workflows, manage complex trading platforms, accelerate drug development and build procurement systems. The group generates a majority of its revenue from the domestic market. It serves various industries such as education; insurance; retail; telecom and media and others.
Zywave
Investors
Provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise automation software for the employee benefits and property and casualty insurance distribution industry. The company's cloud-based insurance and financial planning software offers agency management, claims data and benefit plan analysis, compliance, risk management, client communication, agency marketing and pharmacy benefits management, enabling brokers and their clients to increase initial prospect meetings, better close rates and shortened selling cycles in the intensely competitive independent brokerage market.
Florence (Other Healthcare Technology Systems)
Investors
Developer of an electronic document workflow software designed to make clinical trial documents compliant and simple. The company's software reduces redundant chores for sites and permits and automates trial site access to make remote monitoring of documents possible while giving real-time insights into study progress, enabling clients to streamline trial operations and accelerate studies.
Darwinbox
Investors
Developer of SaaS-based human resource management (HRMS) platform designed to transform the interaction between the workforce and technology. The company's platform offers an easy-to-use interface, functional depth, faster implementation cycles, and unique new-age features including e-onboarding, merit planning, continuous feedback, performance journals, and insightful analytics, enabling mid to large-sized enterprises to manage core operations and drive employee engagement and performance.
Bitrise
Investors
Developer of mobile continuous integration and delivery platform designed to craft powerful workflows for every development stage. The company's platform includes full automation, a visual workflow editor, automatic repository scan, and workflow configuration to build, test and deploy apps, enabling developers to build their apps for any mobile platform, be it native or hybrid, and to increase productivity, speed of iteration, and get apps to product-market fit faster.
NEOGOV
Investors
Provider of Software as a Service (SaaS) and on-demand human capital (HCM) resource applications. The company develops software suites with a focus on automating the entire hiring, onboarding and performance evaluation process, including position requisition approval, automatic minimum qualification screening, test statistics and analysis, ensuring increased employee productivity and engagement, time and cost savings, improved regulatory requirement compliance and reduced paper processes, with a net result of better services for citizens.
Kore.ai
Investors
Developer of an experience optimization platform designed to help organizations design, develop, test, and manage chatbots for internal or customer-facing business scenarios. The company's platform helps to deploy one or more of a range of communication channels including messaging and collaboration services, enabling clients to improve digital customer interactions, business processes, and employee work through conversational interfaces.
Replicant
Investors
Developer of a conversational artificial intelligence platform intended to provide always-on support and resolve nuanced customer challenges over the phone. The company's artificial intelligence platform allows consumers to engage in natural conversations across voice, messaging, and other digital channels to resolve their customer support issues and the system can scale up or down instantly, and can be implemented in weeks, thereby helping companies automate their common customer service calls while empowering agents to focus on more complex and nuanced customer challenges.
AgentSync
Investors
Developer of modern insurance infrastructure intended to connect carriers, agencies, MGAs, and producers. The company solutions create onboarding, licensing, and appointing processes for insurers and producers while ensuring growth and compliance, thereby providing customer-centric design, seamless APIs, automation, and unparalleled service to its clients.
Rossum
Investors
Developer of data management software designed to create a world without manual data entry. The company's software offers an end-to-end AI document processing solution that combines the leading cognitive data capture platform with a full suite of integration capabilities, enabling companies to capture data from financial documents without any template and with human-level accuracy.
Gluware
Investors
Developer of a cloud-based network orchestration platform intended to automate and orchestrate large multi-vendor, mission-critical networks. The company's platform simplifies multi-vendor network complexity while reducing life cycle costs and boosting network agility, enabling service providers and value-added resellers to provide enterprise-grade cloud networking services to their customers.
Quali
Investors
Developer of a DevOps automation and orchestration software designed to automate and improve DevOps lifecycle and productivity. The company's platform uses cloud sandboxes which is a personal replica of a production environment for automating DevOps to provide product lifecycle testing, management, and optimization among the other technologies, enabling enterprises and service providers to increase productivity and efficiency for engineering, sales and security organizations while cutting costs.
Oxbotica
Investors
Developer of an AI-based platform intended to bring autonomy to any industry. The company provides a full suite of universal autonomy software that is fully modular, has low compute power requirements and uses laser vision and radar for localization and perception for redundancy and safety purposes, and is fully integrated with a cloud management service, enabling businesses to help bring autonomy to all vehicles, in all places at all times.
Forethought
Investors
Developer of AI-powered tools designed to embed relevant information into the daily workflows of employees proactively. The company's tool immediately responds to customers, resolves simple issues with real-time assistance, automates repetitive routing that agents spend valuable time doing and provides insights, enabling businesses to decrease their resolution time and increase agent productivity.
ABBYY
Investors
Developer of document conversion, data capture and linguistic software designed to capture and extract information using artificial intelligence. The company's SaaS-based platform offers document capture and language-based technologies that integrate across the information lifecycle, starting from document scanning and text recognition to data analysis and knowledge extraction.
Qventus
Investors
Developer of hospital management software designed for hospital teams to make better operational decisions in real-time. The company's platform helps to address operational challenges across the hospital including emergency departments, preoperative areas, patient safety, inpatient, outpatient, and pharmacy, enabling clients to turn data into action and make better operational decisions in real-time.
BRYTER
Investors
Developer of a no-code automation platform intended to help consulting firms, banks, corporates and public administration across the globe to digitize and scale their services. The company's platform helps professionals to build, manage, and sell interactive applications, without the need for programming or coding skills, enabling clients to automate recurring and standardizable decision-making processes.
Synthace
Investors
Developer of a laboratory automation platform designed to reshape biological experimentation. The company's platform removes the wrangling of lab data through the dynamic generation, capture and structuring of data with metadata, connects the experiment with other tools in the digital ecosystem and helps to plan and execute multi-factorial experiments, enabling biologists to conduct codeless reprogramming of liquid handlers and visual stimulation before executing experiments.
