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Robotic process automation (RPA) startup FortressIQ today announced that it raised $30 million, the bulk of which founder and CEO Pankaj Chowdhry said will be put toward product research and development. It comes after the formation of a partnership with Microsoft and a new integration with Power Automate, Microsoft’s workflow automation creation platform, which rebranded and relaunched last November.
RPA — technology that automates monotonous, repetitive chores traditionally performed by human workers — is big business. Forrester estimates that in 2019, it and other AI subfields created jobs for 40% of companies and that a full one-tenth of startups now employ more digital workers than human ones. Moreover, firms like Market and Markets anticipate the market will be worth $493 billion by 2022 with a compound annual growth rate of 19%.
FortressIQ’s marquee product is Virtual Process Analyst (VPA), which taps AI — specifically computer vision and natural language processing — to “learn” business tasks as they occur in real time. VPA doesn’t require APIs, transaction logs, or installation to provide insights that aid in the transition from manual to automated pipelines, and it works with existing free, proprietary, and commercial applications.
As Chowdhry explains it, VPA basically replaces high-level human consultants who perform time and motion studies. The cloud-hosted tool captures videos of processes and applies AI that watches the videos and transcribes them into software interactions. Data mining ensures that if the person whose actions were captured became distracted by another task, the noise can be filtered out automatically.
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“Enabling customers to succeed in their business transformation journeys by creating and building the system of record for work is our core mission at FortressIQ, and we’re grateful to have the support of our investors — past, new, and future — to make it happen,” said Chowdhry. “For us, it’s also about more than just the mission. How we get there and who we surround ourselves with is equally as important. We’re dedicated to creating successful and intentional partnerships with companies whose values align with ours.
No matter how differentiating FortressIQ’s technology might be, the company has its work cut out for it. RPA startup UiPath’s latest funding round totaled $568 million at a valuation of $7 billion. In September 2018, Softomotive brought in $25 million. Automation Anywhere last secured a $290 million investment from SoftBank, valuing the company at $6.8 billion. And Blue Prism recently raised over $120 million.
Microsoft venture fund M12 and Tiger Global Management co-led FortressIQ’s latest round (a series B), with participation from earlier backers Boldstart Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Eniac Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. It brings the startup’s total raised to $42 million following a $12 million series A in December 2018.
M12’s participation is a bit curious in light of a Bloomberg report suggesting that Microsoft is in talks to acquire Softmotive, but it’s not unlikely that the tech giant is hedging its bets on a segment that, while profitable, has recently seen instability. In October, UiPath laid off between 300 to 400 employees (roughly 11% of its workforce) in what it characterized as a move toward efficiency. More recently, Automation Anywhere let go of 10% of its workforce as it adapts to stronger demand for cloud services motivated by the pandemic.
